Do You Know If You Have Signatures?

Transcriptions of documents are great and make reading the entire item and searching for specific text easy. But if your relative signed documents, there are times when those signatures need to be compared. Do you keep track of whether or not you have a known ancestor’s signature and do you try and collect as many digital images of those signatures as possible?

In tracking the movement of one relative, I finally realized that I had a “known signature” of him when he signed a son’s marriage bond and a signed document from a record that I thought was him in a location a hundred miles away. If I had “flagged” him as someone for whom I had a signature, the comparison would not have taken so long.