We always want to see that record with our relative’s name and usually are not interested in other documents in the same series of records that contains the names of “other people.”
We should be.
Sometimes those documents on other people can help us to read, interpret, and understand the document we have on our ancestor.
Recently I obtained copies of land evaluations of confiscated British property in Maryland during the American Revolution. Fortunately for me I needed copies of three separate records. The first one had some verbiage that was difficult to read and just as difficult to understand in the bottom left corner of the document. When I looked at the other two documents, it appeared that these documents were similar in form and structure. On the second two the mysterious text was clearly a reference to a parcel of property that described the property being value. With this knowledge, I had an easier time reading that which originally was difficult.
Seeing other records can help us to understand the record we have–particularly when those records are not created on pre-printed forms with blanks to fill in.
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