I am thinking of the Rev. Lucius Robinson Paige (1802-1896), a tireless recorder of Massachusetts local histories.[1] His approach to historical research is one we venerate today; that is was worthy of comment says something important about the histories published earlier in the nineteenth century:
[Paige] never gave his readers anything for fact which he got by inference, or hearsay, or by a guess. For this reason his work in the historical field is of permanent value. . . . The founders of Cambridge and Hardwick were to him like the living men whom he met in his daily walks. His books are valuable to us, not only because of the thoroughness of research which distinguishes them, but because they set the past before us as it really was.[2]
The last survivor of the Society’s five founders died in 1889. William Henry Montague was a Boston merchant in the 1840s; later, when he fell on hard times, his friend William Trask noted that he was possessed “of a remarkable memory[;] he could point out, often, even during his years of blindness, the way and the where to obtain the right information on many given [historical] subjects.”[5]
While it always tempting to ascribe outsized characteristics to those who have gone before us, these predecessors – energetic, often long-lived, devoted to building a new organization – come down to us with undimmed luster.
[1] He is recorded as the first elected member of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, on 21 January 1845.
[2] Rev. Alphonso Everett White, “Rev. Lucius Robinson Paige, A.M., D.D.,” The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 52 [1898]: 301.
[3] Proceedings of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1923, xiv. Annual Meeting 7 February 1923.
[4] As Chris notes, she was one of several members of the closely-knit Child family to take an interest in NEHGS. “Donations to the Society,” Register 2 [1848]: 230-31; “Payments for the Register, &c.,” Register 8 [1854]: 200.
[5] Tribute to William Henry Montague in Register 44 [1890]: 350.