Waters, opus consists largely of copies of lengthy abstracts of wills in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury which bear some relation to early American families. In addition, it contains genealogical notes and pedigrees, maps, tabular charts, illustrations, and an index of 30,000 names as well as a fifty-one page index of places, with details of where many of the early families settled. Furthermore, as John T. Hassam noted in the Introduction to the work, "These pages contain wills relating not only to New England families, but to those of Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, New York, Pennsylvania, and the West Indies. These researches, in short, have been conducted in no narrow spirit, and they should interest everyone of English descent in every part of our country."