INDENTURES AND WILLS DATABASES
Instructions for searching the databases
The search forms allow you to search for any field or, to narrow your search, for several fields together. For example, if you search for Last Name: Athill, you will get many Athills in the results. If you search for Last Name: Athill and First Name: John, you will get fewer results.
The Wills database has fields for Last Name, First Name(s), and information on where the information is located:
Location No refers to the volume where the transaction is recorded. This is where the archivist will go to find the pages you are looking for. If there is no LocNo, that is because we could not find that volume although it must have existed at one point.
Dates refers to the dates covered by the particular volume (not the date of the actual document).
Page refers to the page in the volume where the transaction can be found.
The Indentures database has more much detail, with several additional fields:
Subject refers to the type of transaction (for example, sale of land).
Detail refers to the person or parties involved in the transaction (for example, To John Camacho). It is less useful than other fields for searching but will give you additional information in the results.
Year refers to the year of the transaction as recorded from the document.
The search function is not sensitive to case, so you can use upper or lower case in your search.
You can also search for partial words in most of the fields. You do this by putting blank spaces at the beginning or end of the word. This is useful because some names are spelled several ways (example: Camacho and Camache–so you could enter Cam and get them all). In the same way, some subjects are described slightly differently but are really the same thing (example: sale and sales—so you can enter sale ).
You can see all the records through the Indentures or Wills report forms. You can filter within the form.
[NOTE: This database was created by Dr. Susan Lowes from indexes typed by Archives staff under the leadership of Dr. Marion Blair. While some corrections were made while creating the database, the pages were not systematically checked against the originals and there may be errors. Please feel free to email lowes.susan@gmail.com if you find names or other information that need to be corrected.]