There is still room in my December 2015 session of “US Land Records.” More details are on our announcement page–join us!
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.
When transcribing old documents make certain that what is in the margin of the document as an annotation does not become part of the text of the document itself. This 1742 deed from Massachusetts has several annotations–these are made for the clerks and others using the records. They are not a part of the actual document. A transcription of these items should indicate that they were in the margin of the document. Including them right in the text may create confusion.
A reference to a woman as the “late widow” does not mean that she is deceased. There’s a good chance that the reference indicated she had remarried and was no longer single. The word “deceased” is frequently used to mean “dead.” “Late” in this sense probably means that she was “formerly” a widow. Her being referred to as the “late widow of Samuel Sargent” does not mean that her deceased husband had returned from the dead.
There is still room in my December 2015 session of “US Land Records.” More details are on our announcement page–join us!
If you have encountered the phrase “old tenor” in a document and wondered what it was, this posting on my Rootdig site has more information. [I normally don’t repost, but thought this one was worth sharing with Tip of the Day readers.]
Try to avoid inferring more from a document than what it actually says. A quick reading of a 1742 deed from Massachusetts suggested the wife was dead. However a slower, more careful reading of the deed, indicated that the deed clearly stated only the husband was dead. It was never actually stated the wife was dead. Always read a document more than once. And think about what it says. And more importantly: what it does not.
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