A Family History Mission: The Oddities and Unusual

1 July 1776 Probate file from Charles County, Maryland

No. 66

Note: You can do a Google search for "A Family History Mission James Tanner" to see all the previous posts in this ongoing series. You can also search for "James Tanner genealogy" and find them or click back through all the posts.

Ome of the most interesting parts of digitizing records at the Maryland State Archives is finding old, unusual, or strange records. This past week, I began digitizing a Probate Record beginning the 1760s and found this record that was dated 1 July 1776. While monumental things were going on in some parts of the world, the courts in Charles County, Maryland were chugging away with their usual calendar of court cases. For me, this was interesting because the documents in the National Archives from 1776 are behind glass, but I get to see the documents close up and digitize them. But this also reminds me of the immense value of these document and so we want to be as careful as possible in handling them.

Here is an image of the two-page spread with the entry from 1776.

If you look closely, you can see the cover that is used to protect the books from some types of harm while on the shelves. The cover wraps around the book and is fastened velcro.

Here is a closeup of the earliest record I have digitized so far from 1764.

Here is the entire page.

These Probate Inventory books were very skinny but long.

I am going to do a post about the strange terms and names I find in old probate documents.

Here's an example of the lovely endpaper in some of the books. The older books have beautiful and very readable handwriting for the most part.

I have plenty more to write about, so stay tuned.