When genealogist Kathy Beals started her half of the research for the book Early Families of Bradford, New Hampshire, this is what she knew about Henry S. Baker: He died a pauper in Bradford in 1855.

By the time the book was released last month, her picture of Baker was much more complete.

He was born in New Boston and had blue eyes. In 1814, at age 22, he enlisted in the Navy. The Navy released him with a pension in 1840 after he lost his hand in an accident aboard a ship. By 1850, he was no longer living with his wife, Lydia. She lived in Carroll with two children, one of whom had been ordained a Baptist minister.

Beals teamed up with local genealogist Sherry Gould six years ago to compile a 583-page alphabetical account of the early settlers of Bradford and their descendants up until the Civil War, from Asa Abbot to Daniel Young and all who fall in between. The book, which was sponsored by the Bradford Historical Society, was released last month and is the first full genealogical account of the town.

For Beals, who splits her time between Bradford and California and used to be a volunteer genealogist with the California Genealogical Society, the most exciting part of the project has been piecing together the little known lives like Baker's.

"For somebody I had hardly been able

to figure anything out about, (the account) was very thorough," Beals said. "It was just this interesting picture."

The project was intended as a sequel to the town history, Two Hundred Plus, which was printed for the 1976 bicentennial celebration.

The women's research took longer than either had expected it would, partly because of the explosion of resources available on the Internet and partly due to the painstakingly meticulous work involved.

Gould and Beals didn't just compile a list of who was born in Bradford, procreated and died. Using the town's vital records, individual family histories, probate records, newspapers, church and cemetery records and more, they also collected as many details as possible to humanize those names, including information on lawsuits, marriages and separations, squabbles between townspeople, and land transactions and gifts.

The book also includes a list of Irish laborers who lived temporarily in the town to build the railroad, war rolls, and a list of Irish soldiers hired as substitutes for Bradford men during the Civil War.

Gould, who retired from being a social worker to work as an independently contracted genealogist a few years ago, said the research is intended mostly for use by descendents who are looking for their family's past.

Beals said a compilation of an entire town's genealogy can be a good resource for descendents because such broad research can find links between families that wouldn't otherwise be discovered when tracing just one bloodline.

Early Families of Bradford is the sixth book that Beals has published and the second on a New Hampshire town. She wrote a genealogy of Unity after she began researching her own ancestors there and just kept searching to "do a whole town thing."

"When you are searching for anybody in an entire town, everybody is of interest to you," she said.

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