You Do

When reading a handwritten record copy of a will, deed, or other legal record in a volume of other such records, remember:

You are seeing a handwritten copy of the clerk’s interpretation of someone else’s handwriting on the original document. That will of my relative in a 1750-era will book from Virginia is what the clerk thought he saw on the original will. That handwritten deed in a volume of deeds from Iowa in the 1860s is what the clerk thought he saw on the original handwritten deed. It’s possible the handwriting was in places difficult to read. We have no way of knowing the ease with which the transcriptionist could read the original document. We have no way of knowing where the clerk had to use his best judgement.

The clerk’s job was to copy exactly. Sometimes that was not easy.