The eleven letters in this collection were either written by or addressed to three members of the Parsons and Williams families: Rev. Joseph Parsons (1702-1765), his son Rev. Joseph Parsons, Jr. (1733-1771), and his daughter-in-law Sarah Williams (1737-1800). The elder Parsons graduated from Harvard in 1720 and served as minister in Bradford, Massachusetts from 1726 until his death in 1765. He and his wife Frances Usher had three sons; the oldest was Joseph, Jr., who followed his father to Harvard, graduating in 1752. In 1757 Joseph Parsons, Jr. was elected minister in Brookfield, Massachusetts. In 1763 he married Sarah Williams, of Waltham, Massachusetts. Williams' family background was not unlike her husband's; both her father and grandfather were Harvard-educated ministers. The couple remained in Brookfield and had one daughter, Sarah Parsons, born in 1764. The elder Joseph Parsons died in 1765, the younger in 1771. Sarah Williams Parsons remarried in 1777, to Eliphalet Williams, a Yale-educated minister from East Hartford, Connecticut. She bore two additional children before her death, in 1800.