The paper entitled Ezekiel Cheever and Some of his Descendants was prepared for, and published in, the New England Historical and Genealogical Register for April 1879. The same type has now been used to print a few copies in pamphlet form, for private distribution. There has been added to it, as an Appendix, the Cheever Manuscript in the Library of the Boston Athenaeum, now for the first time printed in full.
This Cheever Manuscript is a small book, a little more than three inches wide and four inches long, bound in thick leather covers, containing in all, including fly leaves, one hundred and twenty-four pages. On the first leaf is the date “1631,” on the second “Ezekiel Cheeuer his booke,” the poems themselves beginning on the third. The pages are not numbered, but, in this edition, in order to facilitate reference to the original, numbers, corresponding with the pages of the MS. as they now are, have been added in the margin in brackets, the first page on which the poems begin being numbered page [1^] and so on consecutively. The poems now fill the first forty-seven pages of the MS., but after page [18*] and page [20*] a leaf in each case seems to have been torn out. On nineteen other pages there are entries in shorthand. These have been lately deciphered by William P. Upham, Esq., of Salem, who finds them to be texts of Scripture. A specimen of this shorthand can be seen at the bottom of the plate which forms the frontispiece of this book.
Digital Book
Source
Hassam, John Tyler, Ezekiel Cheever and some of his descendants, Boston, Massachusetts: Printed by David Clapp & Son, 1879.