Order received from sampubco!

On 7 June I ordered digital copies of wills from SamPubCo for three of my ancestors, James Russell, Jacob Dayton and Luther Kallam. I sent another email last Sunday asking for the status of my order and today I received it!

I tried to follow his instructions for opening the .zip files but in the end simply saved them to my desktop and opened and extracted them. Then I saved them to the proper place in my genealogy file.

Over the next week I will transcribe them, but for now, a few highlights:

The will for James Russell is 6 pages long and it mentions his son Benjamin, whom I believe to be my ancestor. This is one of those lines that I have taken mostly on faith, so I hesitate to declare emphatically that this is indeed my ancestor, but I think it is and I will continue to do research to either prove or disprove it.

It mentions his wife Anna, whose name I did not have before. He gave her two beds and the curtains for them along with other items including two cows and one horse and "the best room in my house for her use".

The will for Jacob Dayton is 36 pages long. I haven't read all of it yet, but it does mention his daughter Martha, wife of Benjamin Russell. Just from scanning a few pages, I take it there was some discussion about his competency to make a will.

The will for Luther Kallam is one page long and mentions his beloved daughters including my ancestor Betsey. All of his daughters receive his household furniture and a horse, to be divided equally among them. In addition to her share of the furniture, Betsey was bequeathed one cow. He left his daughter-in-law Diane his "looms with all the apparatus belonging thereto."

So very interesting. Don't you wish we could go back and look at the house and the beds and curtains and the loom? And more importantly, meet the people!

So many genealogical riches in one day!