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Tuesday, December 23, 2014

MY 2014 FESTIVUS AIRING OF GENEALOGICAL GRIEVANCES

It's Festivus, and in the spirit of the holiday, I have some genealogy grievances I wish to air:

-I've been working on probate files for Essex and Middlesex counties, Massachusetts, and
while I've found many wills and estate inventories of ancestors,  I've also found files that
only have three images. The problem is that some of those might contain images of a will
and perhaps an inventory, and that's good. But others just have an image of a scrap of
paper with the words"No paper found" written upon it, meaning there are no actual records.
It's frustrating and I wish these sort of files were categorized separately from the rest of the
probate files to save me the time I spend on a useless file!

- I hate the Appletons. I don't know if they were related to each other but Daniel and Jonathan
Appleton appear to have been court clerks in 17th century Essex County and involved in a
number of the proceedings for those of my ancestors who died intestate. The
thing is, both Appletons had handwriting which is a pain the butt to decipher. Bah humbug!

-People who insist on writing "Worcester County" as "Worchester County". There is no
h in Worcester, which is why it's pronounced "Wis-tah", not "Wor-chess-ter".

That's all I can think of for genealogy grievances this year.

And stay off my lawn!

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