BACK of the St. John's Episcopal Church, formerly the Methodist Church, on Washington St., Duxbury, Mass., is a small cemetery which contained only twenty gravestones in July, 1907.   In that month two members of the Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants, Mr. Stanley W. Smith, of Boston, and the late Mr. John W. Willard, made and presented to the Society careful copies of all the inscriptions in this cemetery; but we have not heretofore found an opportunity to print them, on account of the space devoted to the records in three older and more important cemeteries in that town, copied by the same gentlemen, and to the original town records, copied by myself.

     In 1911, the New England Historic Genealogical Society, of Boston, published "Vital Records of Duxbury Massachusetts to the year 1850", which professed to include not only all the town and church records of births, baptisms, marriages and deaths, prior to 1850, but also all gravestone records of deaths, prior to 1850, which are not found on the town records.

       That book, unfortunately, contains serious errors in names and dates, and its compilers overlooked and, therefore, failed to print several hundreds of records dated prior to 1850.

   I have long known that there was a remarkable proportion of variations between the records in the cemetery back of the Episcopal church, as they were copied by Messrs. Smith and Willard, and the same records as they were printed by the N. E. H. G. Society; but I have made it an invariable rule not to publish any statement that a record has been incorrectly printed by others, until I have personally re-examined the original record, with both copies before me, and, in the present case, other work has prevented the necessary examination.

     Through the courtesy of Miss Sally Freeman Dawes of Duxbury, a member of this Society, I have recently been able to visit the cemetery, and with her assistance the original manuscript copies made by Messrs. Smith and Willard were critically com-