No single record tells the story of a colonial township. The history of Rochester, N.H. is recovered from many classes of sources read together: the original town books and proprietary records; deeds and division schedules; the sermons of the town's ministers; provincial census returns and tax lists; newspaper notices in the New Hampshire Gazette; and the correspondence of the provincial government at Portsmouth.
Each source corrects and completes the others. Tax lists reveal what town meeting minutes omit; sermons carry the temper of the community that population counts cannot; and the proprietors' schedules explain the pattern of settlement on the ground.
The research method and full source apparatus are presented in In Their Own Words, the transcription and research volume of the series.