This Massachusetts Genealogy Trails site is hosted by Nancy
(Caswell) Washell. I have been working on MA genealogy for almost 30
years. Both my maternal and paternal families lived throughout MA. I feel
very passionate that we should have this data online and FREE for the
public. Massachusetts is so vital to just about any researcher! Our
ancestors should be proud of the excellant record keeping they did. Little
did they know hundreds of years later we would want to know more about them,
whether they were farmers or lawyers!
Massachusetts
takes its name from the Massachusetts
tribe of Native Americans, who lived in the Great Blue Hill region, south of
Boston. The Indian term supposedly means "at or about the Great Hill".
There are, however, a number of interpretations of the exact
meaning of the word. The Jesuit missionary Father Rasles thought that it came
from the word Messatossec, "Great-Hills-Mouth": "mess" (mass) meaning "great";
"atsco" (as chu or wad chu) meaning "hill"; and sec (sac or saco) meaning
"mouth". The Reverend John Cotton used another variation: "mos" and "wetuset",
meaning "Indian arrowhead", descriptive of the Native Americans hill home.
Another explanation is that the word comes from "massa" meaning "great" and
"wachusett", "mountain-place".
Massachusetts, like Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky, is
called a "Commonwealth". Commonwealths are states, but the reverse is not true.
Legally, Massachusetts is a commonwealth because the term is contained in the
Constitution. In the era leading to 1780, when the state Constitution was
ratified, a popular term for a whole body of people constituting a nation or
state was the word "Commonwealth." This term was the preferred usage of some
political writers. There also may have been some anti-monarchic sentiment in
using the word "Commonwealth." The name, which in the eighteenth century was
used to mean "republic", can be traced to the second draft of the state
Constitution, written by John Adams and accepted by the people in 1780. In this
second draft, Part Two of the Constitution, under the heading "Frame of
Government", states, "that the people...form themselves into a free, sovereign,
and independent body politic, or state by the name of The Commonwealth of
Massachusetts." The people had overwhelmingly rejected the first draft of the
Constitution in 1778, and in that draft and all acts and resolves up to the time
between 1776 and 1780, the name "State of Massachusetts Bay" had been used.
John Adams utilized this term when framing the Massachusetts
Constitution, therefore. In his "Life and Works", Adams, wrote: "There is,
however, a peculiar sense in which the words republic, commonwealth, popular
state, are used by English and French writers, who mean by them a democracy, a
government in one centre, and that centre a single assembly, chosen at stated
periods by the people and invested with the whole sovereignty, the whole
legislative, executive and judicial power to be included in a body or by
committees as they shall think proper."