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The six volumes of Hinshaw's legendary'Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy'were published between 1936 and 1950, just prior to the author's death. In the nearly fifty years since its completion, the Encyclopedia has remained the pre-eminent reference work in Quaker genealogy. Still, for all its gilt-edged data and its reams and reams of vital records, the Encyclopedia has a flaw: it does not contain an every-name index; instead, each volume has a separate surname index. So not only does the researcher have to examine six separate indexes, he also has to check out every reference to a given surname--page by page. Needless to say, this is a cumbersome and tedious procedure and is certainly not in the best interest of the researcher, who for fifty years has endured this lapse with surprising fortitude. Now, however, comes an index to Hinshaw--the index, one might say--and all impediments to research are immediately overcome. Here in one mammoth volume--in a single alphabetical sequence--are the 600,000 names found in the great Encyclopedia.

The second volume of the great Encyclopedia is complete in itself for the New Jersey and Pennsylvania monthly meetings which were part of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. It includes all records of genealogical value, both Orthodox and Hicksite, known to be in existence for the meetings from the last quarter of the seventeenth century down to the time the work was originally published in 1938. The records are of two principal classes: (1) births and deaths and (2) minutes and marriages, and they are arranged in alphabetical order, by family name, under their corresponding monthly meeting. The marriages are arranged by the names of both brides and grooms. Also provided are abstracts of Quaker certificates of removal, which enable genealogists to trace Quaker ancestors from one monthly meeting to another.