But the day came when we sat down to compile. Alas! our sins had found us out! A stack of notebooks lay before us, and through them all were scattered our data for each name, without system or chronological order. Oh, the despair of going through that pile of books, turning down pages and numbering items according to dates, in a desperate attempt to arrange the material for each name so as to compile the facts in a decent order!
In spite of all our care, the wretched books concealed desirable items until our manuscript had passed the proper place of insertion, sardonically calling our attention to the omissions when we were busy with another subject. How we grew to hate those notebooks, and how they tormented us with a plague of re-writing! We had a premonition that they would conceal some things to the very last; and, sure enough, having tortured us during the days of writing, humiliated us in the proof-sheets, and demanded a display of errata as the book went to press, they waited until it was nicely printed, bound and published before making their final disclosures!
To obviate all this trouble, we now have the Grafton Genealogical Notebook, American Form. As the last two words indicate, this notebook embodies the arrangement of the "clan" genealogy used by the most eminent American genealogists and adopted by such organizations as the New England Historic-Genealogical Society and the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society.
This notebook consists of a succession of groups of pages, each group arranged with blanks to receive the data for a whole family. The facts are written in their proper spaces when first ascertained, and when the work of research is finished it will be found that the work of compilation has taken care of itself! In fact, the notebook is self-compiling. The blank spaces are arranged in the order of the statements as they are to appear on the printed page, the connecting words and proper punctuation being printed in the notebook. Having filled in all the spaces which our data requires, we simply draw a pen through the rest, and our book is practically compiled, for its own leaves may be sent to the printer as manuscript! The leaves are perforated so that they may be readily detached, and thus we are saved the labor and the possible errors of recopying.