On the silver anniversary of my connection with the management of the REGISTER, I pause in my labors to address personally a few words to its readers. This autumn completes twenty-five years of continuous service as a member of the publishing committee, during nearly eight of which I have been either editor or joint editor of this periodical. All my associates when I commenced serving on this committee, except one, are dead, and the editor at that time has also passed away. Samuel G. Drake, A.M., then the editor and publisher, had no superior in this country as an antiquary. He had edited four and a half of the eight volumes issued, and had published seven. He afterwards edited five more volumes, and published six more, making nine and a half years of labor as editor and thirteen as publisher. I have already, in the preface to the volume for 1863, in which I gave a history of the REGISTER for the first seventeen years of its existence, referred to his valuable services to this periodical. He did more than any one else to fix the character of its contents. Besides bestowing much unrequited labor upon it, he assumed the whole pecuniary responsibility in its early days, when it was an experiment, and, though never remunerative, twice resumed it when others gave it up. To him and to Mr. Joel Munsell, of Albany, the REGISTER is much indebted in this respect. The chairman of the committee to which I was then elected, was the Rev. William Jenks, D.D., LL.D., author of the "Comprehensive Commentary on the Bible," and one of the founders of the American Oriental Society. He was a gentleman of great erudition and particularly versed in biblical lore. He also possessed a taste for genealogy and American history, in both of which he was proficient. He was scrupulously attentive to his duties on the committee. Courtesy and candor were marked characteristics of this venerated man. Mr. Lemuel Shattuck, another of my associates, was one of the founders of the New England Historic, Genealogical Society, as was also Mr. Drake, the editor, already noticed. His "History of Concord" and his system of family registration show Mr. Shattuck's early interest in local history and genealogy. Few had so clear an idea of the possibilities of genealogy as a science, or did |