Person talk:Jonathan Woodman (7)

Captain? [10 December 2009]

Is there a source that identifies this Jonathan Woodman as Captain? Because the death record does not.

The death record of his cousin Person:Jonathan Woodman (5) of Bradford, s/o Joshua, identifies that Jonathan as Captain, and Deacon.

So if there is not a source that identifies this Jonathan as Captain too, it might be better to remove the title to avoid confusing the two like-named cousins, since there were born very close in date, 1 Apr 1674 and 16 Apr 1674, and are already likely to be confused with each other. --Jrich 09:14, 10 December 2009 (EST)

Images of will [19 March 2017]

As always, access to wills is a great resource for everybody. However, my experience is that a more useful approach would be to post a transcription or an abstract.

First, I note that the images are available for free on amsericanancestors.org here since it is a public document donated by a public agency. No membership is required to see them. Thus one can accomplish the same result as posting the images by simply posting the link while saving disk space on WeRelate. Instead of downloading three high-resolution images to read the will, the reader can now follow one link to get to the whole probate file.

(In this case, the probate file is also on familysearch.org here if you sign up for a free account, which is sometimes useful since they have easily accessible contrast/brightness tools that can be useful with dark, blotted, or otherwise hard-to-read documents. In this case, familysearch.org also has the recorded will here - though unlike a file, documents were recorded as processed by the court, so are not stored sequentially, and require use of the docket to locate - but depending on whose handwriting is better, having access to the clerk's copy in the records may help with hard to read documents.)

That said, there are two other reasons that suggest that posting the images is not a great strategy. First: images are not readable by search engines, while transcriptions and abstracts are, and by typing in one of those, instead of an image, you are making the information available to be searched and possibly returned to some descendant's query.

Second: the probate file is 158 pages long and there is undoubtedly other useful bits of information somewhere in the other 155 pages, possibly the married name of a daughter changes, possibly by the time the estate is settled a child dies and the child's heirs are listed, possibly the death of the widow is noted, etc. To be useful to a reader, scanning the whole file and abstracting/summarizing the useful parts would be great, but linking to the whole probate file, rather than providing 3 pages out of 158, would at least give the reader access to all the information. --Jrich 19:16, 19 March 2017 (UTC)