Rosemary Harvell and the Town Clerk's Office proposed and received CPA funding to preserve the Town Records in the years 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012. As part of that project the Town Records books were sent to NEDCC where they were "conserved" and also scanned.
Indexed thumbnails (idxThumbs) shows the pages of the Sudbury Miscellaneous Records 1639 to 1824Records of the Westerly Precinct
Transcriptions of records
The single largest category of content, exactly as that title page promises, is land holdings. The bulk of the volume consists of entries headed "The Land(s) of [Name]," recording the acreage granted to individual Sudbury inhabitants -- beginning with the original proprietors of 1639/40 (William Pelham, Edmund Browne, Peter Noyes, Walter Haynes, Edmund Goodenow, and dozens more) and continuing with later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century grants, including a block of land known as the "New Grants." Each entry typically gives the parcel's acreage and a metes-and-bounds description (trees, stones, stakes, swamps, and neighbors' lands used as boundary markers), and many entries were amended or added to over subsequent decades as land changed hands.
Nearly as prominent, and interleaved throughout the land entries rather than gathered in one place, are records of roads. These take the form of highway "layouts" (selectmen formally laying out a new town way or highway at a resident's request, with a bounds description in the same style as a land grant) and later highway alterations. A dedicated run of such entries appears in the eighteenth-century portion of the book, and the front-matter index lists roads by their common descriptive names (e.g., "Highway from Snake Brook to Town," "Highway over Whale[?] Bridge").
A related but distinct category is town-boundary perambulation -- periodic certificates, mostly from the 1780s through 1829, in which the selectmen of Sudbury and a neighboring town (Concord, Framingham, Marlborough, Stow, Acton, or East Sudbury) certify that they walked and re-marked the line between the towns, along with associated lists of bound marks and the bounds of certain named tracts (Caleb Wheeler's farm, the old Training Field).
A short, self-contained run of pages near the end of the volume departs from the land/road material entirely and preserves Sudbury vital records: a register of births (largely 1639-1701), a page of marriages, and a page of deaths/burials, all in the same secretary hand. Interleaved with these are a livestock ear-mark and brand register (recording individual owners' marks on horses and cattle, 1691-1718) and a single strayed-livestock notice.
The volume also contains several other, more occasional record types: a 1763-66 memorandum listing persons standing as court "cautions" (sureties/bail) sent down to the Clerk of Court; a substantial series of "warning out" warrants (1763-1771) in which constables were ordered to warn newly arrived poor families to depart the town, per the colonial settlement-and-poor-relief law; and a single much later loose document, an 1834 deed or quit-claim/affidavit referencing a mortgage, evidently inserted into the volume long after its main contents were written. Faint, unreadable ink bleed-through from facing leaves -- in several places apparently financial account entries from the 1630s -- shows through on a number of otherwise blank pages but could not be transcribed. Roughly the last quarter of the physical book (covers, pastedowns, and blank endpapers) carries no text at all.
Sudbury Miscellaneous Records 1639 to 1824 2026-09-11