I have looked at very few deeds during the coarse of my genealogy research. The ones that I have in my records have all been sent to me by other researchers and they were usually sent because they proved clues to family relationships. So I knew that deeds could be very valuable and I ordered my first microfilms for deeds several weeks ago.
Because the microfilms are only available to me for a short time, I’ve been concentrating on scanning and saving, but I haven’t really read too many of them. I recently downloaded a great program called Transcript and I have begun to transcribe deeds from my family line. As I work on these transcriptions, it is not only difficult to read the older handwriting styles, but at times it just feels like a string of unrelated words meant to do nothing but confuse and make the writer seem more knowledgeable than he really was! I’m sure that’s not the case, but to this newbie, it’s quite frustrating! I’ve decided to do a little research on reading deeds and thought that I’d gather information that I find helpful into 1 page on this blog. The post will not be conversational (I don’t think) but just a collection of things that I find so that I’ll be able to refer back to it. Feel free to read along and let me know if there’s a web site I should be checking out!
