Friday, April 28, 2006

I had genealogy FUN today



Genealogy FUN for me means finding new and useful data about my ancestors or research subjects. Today was a FUN day!

I decided to go to the San Diego Family History Center in Mission Valley. Two weeks ago, I browsed the book with Bristol County MA probate abstracts for 1687 to 1735 or so, and noted the volumes and page numbers for my many Bristol ancestors. I also ordered the microfilm for Volumes 1 to 4. They called the other day that the film had arrived.

The film has the probate record books that were handwritten by the Probate Court Clerk - so they aren't the original wills written by the testators. But that's OK, those are hard to obtain without visiting the County itself. I'm stuck in San Diego, so the FHLC films work for me!

I managed to get probate records (wills, inventories, affidavits, etc., depending on the situation) for:

* Abigail Carpenter of Rehoboth (d 1681),
* Henry Tucker of Dartmouth (d. 1694),
* Edward Richmond of Taunton (d. 1697),
* Nathaniel Soule of Dartmouth (d. 1700),
* John Woodcock of Dedham and Attleborough (d. 1704),
* Joseph Allen of Dartmouth (d. 1704),
* Nathaniel Potter of Dartmouth (d. 1704),
* Reuben Wait of Dartmouth (d. 1707),
* Arthur Hathaway of Dartmouth (d. 1711),
* Joseph Church of Bristol county (d. 1711),
* Samuel Gray of Taunton (d. 1712),
* Thomas Horton of Rehoboth (d. 1715),
* John Garnsey of Rehoboth (d. 1722),
* Richard Kirby of Dartmouth (d. 1688),
* Mathew Wing of Dartmouth (d. 1724).

Are you related to any of these? If so, please contact me!

The "good" microfilm printer machine at the FHC, which makes 11 x 17 copies for 25 cents a page, is broken and will not be fixed. So I had to use the even older machine which only makes 8.5 x 11 copies. I made about 70 pages of copies.

So that was fun. Now the hard work begins - to abstract the probate records and transcribe the wills. The penmanship of the clerk was partly Elizabethan script, but it is fairly readable. Only one document that I copied had torn edges - the Joseph Church will.

What genealogy FUN have you had recently? Tell me!

No comments: