Windham County, Connecticut Genealogy

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A guide and directory to Windham County Connecticut genealogy, containing both online and offline resources for genealogy and historical research. This website shall contain sources of genealogical data about Windham County such as biographies, cemetery records, census records, church records, court records, family records, land records, military records, naturalization records, and vital records.

This site is a member of the American History and Genealogy Project (AHGP)  an unincorporated not-for-profit network of independent sites devoted to History and Genealogy and covering North American Countries and Territories.  For more information about our group, including how you can join us, please see our about page. My name is Dennis N. Partridge, and I am the host of this county.

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Windham County occupies the northeastern corner of the state of Connecticut, bordering Worcester county, Massachusetts, lying on the north, and Providence and Kent counties in Rhode Island on the east. New London county bounds it on the south and Tolland on the west. Its greatest length, from north to south, is twenty-seven miles, and its greatest width, from east to west, is twenty-three miles. Its north, east and south sides are nearly straight lines, while on the west side its territory interchanges offsets with Tolland. The greatest. variation in the line made by these offsets, however, does not exceed six miles. This occurs on the northwest corner, where the town of Union makes an advance of about the distance mentioned. We may explain that the longest north and south line would be drawn from the northwest corner of Thompson to the southwest corner of Plainfield, and the longest east and west line would be drawn from the northwest corner of Windham to the Rhode Island line, about the middle of Sterling.

The county contains an area of six hundred and twenty square miles and a population, by the last census, of 43,866. This number, however, comprehends the population of Voluntown, then 1,186, which has since been set off from Windham to New London. The population at present would doubtless still exceed that of the census year, since the rapid growth of several of its manufacturing villages would several times make up the deficiency caused by the loss of that town. The county as now constituted contains the towns of Ashford, Brooklyn, Canterbury, Chaplin, Eastford, Hampton, Killingly, Plainfield, Pomfret, Putnam, Scotland, Sterling, Thompson, Windham and Woodstock, fifteen in all; and included in these towns are the incorporated boroughs of Danielsonville and Willimantic.

 

What’s New?

Biographies

I recently added several biographies of the Brown family of Woodstock and Putnam, Windham County, Connecticut. These biographies were extracted from Commemorative Biographical Record of Tolland and Windham Counties Connecticut.

History

The vast majority of information in the following section is based upon History of Windham County, Connecticut, Bayles, Richard M.; New York: W. W. Preston, 1889. We’ve added, corrected and subtracted from this data as we’ve identified flaws or came upon new data. Please excuse any additional mistakes that could be present in such a large collection of data. The town data includes biographical sketches of early settlers in each town!