I've been working off and on for the past week on John Moore Jr.'s probate file. It's taken me longer than I had expected because of several things:
First of all the writing was difficult to read. I use a program called Transcript now for doing transcriptions and had to fiddle around with brightness and magnification of the image, as well as viewing it as a negeative.
There was also the punctuation of the document which uses colons and semi-colons where today we would use commas and periods.
I also struggled with whether or not to use the capitalization of words that the writer of the documents had used.
I was sidetracked a bit with looking for defintions of "Towne Rights" and the word "Convenience" as used in the documents.
I spent some time trying to decipher the spelling of the Indian names of some hills on the property.
Then there was the mystery of why my 7x great grandmother Lydia (Moore) Wetherbee as referred to as "Lydia Winch" in the division of the property.
Finally there is a mention of a "Mary Moore" as John Jr's widow, a person I've found no mention of anywhere until now. I still don't have an answer to that one yet.
But rather than delay any longer, I've decided to post what I have done, beginning with my next post in this series,
1 comment:
Oh how wonderful - a challenging document to manage!! I hate them, but I love them too, because they teach me so much more about genealogy and family history. Cheers, Bill!
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