This site is a repository of information resources for those interested in the history and genealogy of persons descended from John and Margaret (Acres) Rathbun, who decamped from Lancashire (Ditton, to be precise) to settle in North America around the year 1654. A large majority of people bearing the surnames Rathbun, Rathbone and Rathburn are descended from this couple, who made their home on Block Island in the Rhode Island colony.
Beginning in 1981, and continuing for sixteen years, the Rathbun Family Association, under the editorial leadership of Frank H. Rathbun of Fairfax, Virginia, published the Rathbun-Rathbone-Rathburn Family Historian, a quarterly journal of genealogical and historical research.
In addition to providing valuable resources for those interested in lines of descent and the role of various family members in American history, the Historian served as a means of communication and coordination for social activities amongst the descendants of John and Margaret.
This incarnation of the Historian was a monumental opus, comprising original research, essays, recent news, compendia of earlier publications, reproductions of rare and unique photographs and documents, personal commentary and genealogical minutiae. The amount of uncompensated effort involved, by Frank and the other members of the team, is staggering to contemplate.
My father, Frank P. Rathbun, as a member of the Association, accumulated a complete set of the Historian issues, together with the place and name index volumes that were issued periodically. Some years ago he put this collection in my custody. I was also a member of the Association, but my collection was incomplete because I spent a number of years abroad and allowed my membership to lapse.
Recently I realized that no way exists for most researchers and other interested persons to access this vast trove of data -- only a few hundred sets were printed, and none of those appears to be accessible over the Internet. As a consequence, after conferring with Robert Rathbun, the Research Director of the Association, I have decided to undertake the electronic publication of the entire sixteen-year Historian corpus using the better of the print copies of the Historian from the two collections.
The Adobe Reader or an equivalent PDF reader will be required on your system if you do not already have one installed.
A CD-ROM of this archive is available on a cost-plus-postage basis for those who may wish to obtain the documents without the pain and strife of transferring six hundred megabytes of data across a possibly slow data link (not to mention the burden on my server's 700 KB/s connection to the Internet). Click here for details.
NOTICE: On Sunday, April 25, 2010, all Historian PDF files in the archive directories were modified to include searchable text derived from Optical Character Recognition processing of the original scanned document images. This means that you can now use Adobe Reader's search function to locate information you are interested in. If you wish to use the Acrobat Reader search function, you will need to use Historian archive files that you downloaded on or after April 25, 2010. Some tips on searching are here.
Each of the links below will take you to a directory containing the files for the Historian volume for the year indicated. For the first fourteen years, the Historian was published quarterly with sixteen pages per issue. Beginning with Volume 15 it became a twice-per-year publication of twenty pages each.
Once you are in a directory, I strongly recommend that you download the files you are interested in to your own system (this usually involves clicking the file name with the right mouse button and selecting the "Save As..." option) rather than trying to access them directly through your Web browser.
Volume 1 - 1981Four Index volumes were published, covering Historian volumes 1 through 8. Indices for some subsequent volumes were compiled but were never published because of cost.
These index volumes are here.