Remember J. Bailey Moore, who died while at the arduous task of writing History of the Town of Candia?  Well, here’s another New Hampshire historian who died before he could finish his magnum opus.

Joseph Dow (b. 1807) was in the midst of writing A History of Hampton, New Hampshire: From Its Settlement In 1638, to the Autumn of 1892, when he died in 1889. His daughter Lucy set about making sense of her father’s research to complete the book, which was published in 1893.

As far as my making sense of Dow’s genealogical research, there are–count ’em–no fewer than 268 mentions in his book of people with the surname “Brown.” Talk about making your head hurt–particularly considering they all had the same dozen or so first names that were just continuously recycled from one generation to the next.

I think my best bet here would be to pinpoint the first years that the descendants of my John Brown progenitor (~1595-1686) were born in Kensington and Candia after the family began migrating west, as well as the last of his direct descendants to die in Hampton. Hopefully, that process of elimination will help me identify mentions of direct ancestors in Dow’s history.

At some point in the future, I suppose I could try to figure out who was who of my distant Brown relatives in Dow’s history, but I fear the arduous nature of the task would lead to my premature demise.