The strange thing was that I’d been preparing myself for
what I thought would be a very “dry” file, filled with all sorts of boilerplate
and annoying legalese. However, it
started out with Lazarus Johnston’s will, which goes on for a page and a half
and brought up various events that happened after his death. I became so caught up in what must have
happened to his children and grandchildren as a result of those events that I
kept transcribing for about seven more pages.
I worked a bit more on the Easter Johnson file tonight, 10
August 2016. And will have to force
myself to walk away from it a bit, because again I find myself getting swept up
into the lives of these people that I’m transcribing. My suspicion is that even though I’m feel
that the petition case is fraught with drama that the reality is that it’s just
the language being used and that it’s was just “business as usual” for these
family members and the legal personages involved.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens with this case and
if I make more interesting discoveries when I work my way through the other
petition files. I’m making a lot of use
of the Black’s Law Dictionary that David gave me several years ago and am also
learning a bit of the meanings of the legalese that I’m encountering in this
particular petition.
The first part of this post is-as stated in the title-originally from August 7th or at least it was begun on that date. To update you as to my research activities during the interim, this is the latest update.
While transcribing petition files I tried to devote much of my spare time to that process. Unfortunately, doing this left no time to post to this blog. The transcribing task is by no means complete because it's now taken a backseat to a new research project I've begun. Sorry to say, no blog posts will be written about that new project.
I finished transcribing that research day's petition files and moved on to the next file of petitions. Easter Johnson's petition file still interests me, but after transcribing it I've done nothing further with the information.
The thought occurred to me while working with these records that I needed to understand more about the laws that were in effect at that time. Therefore, I began reading Marylynn Salmon's book, Women and the Law of Property in Early America. The book is very informative as to what legal rights women and married couples had when this country began and the "why" some of those laws existed. It was so engrossing; I even took it while working at the FGS conference in Springfield, IL.
After finishing Salmon's book, I began reading the first volume of Genealogical Research: Methods and Sources. I read somewhere, perhaps another genealogy blog about must reads for genealogists and this Milton Rubincam edited tome was among them. Unfortunately, my reading of this has been derailed by another member of the genealogy greats, Donald L. Jacobus. I've been trying to make my way through his book, Genealogy Pastime and Profession.
I will have to make more of an effort to work at transcribing the various petition files and post my findings in this blog.
