The Plymouth Colony Archive Project

Index to Plymouth Colony
Wills and Inventories, 1670-1685

© 2001 Copyright and All Rights Reserved.
by Patricia Scott Deetz

Introduction

The first written records of Plymouth Colony date to 1627, when Governor William Bradford commenced the first volume of Deeds, recording the garden plots laid out in 1620, the division of lands in 1623-24, and the division of cattle in 1627. The recording of wills and inventories began in 1633, with the will of Samuel Fuller, the elder, dated 30 July. All estate administration was handled through the Court at Plymouth until 1685, when a change took place in the judicial system of the Colony, and separate county court registries were created for Barnstable, Bristol and Plymouth. An additional circumstance that affected the location of estate records was a law enacted under the governorship of Sir Edmund Andros, Royal Governor of the Dominion of New England between 1686 and 1689. The law required that all estates in Plymouth Colony and the Massachusetts Bay Colony of more than £50 value were to be handled at Boston. This policy continued after the overthrow of Andros in April 1689, when Plymouth Colony entered its final years of decreasing stability until it was incorporated into Massachusetts Bay Colony on 7 October 1691, and so all Plymouth Colony estate records of £50 and above from 1685 through 1691 are to be found in the records of Suffolk County, Massachusetts.

The Deetz collection of Plymouth Colony Wills and Inventories (7 volumes) has been compiled from transcripts held by Plimoth Plantation, Plymouth, Massachusetts. There are four original manuscript volumes of wills and inventories recorded during the years 1633 through 1685. The volumes are simply labeled "Wills," but contain copies of wills, inventories and other probate records. The volumes and a set of transcripts are held in the office of the Plymouth County Commissioner, adjacent to the Plymouth County Courthouse.

The core of the Plimoth Plantation collection of wills and inventories was compiled under the direction of James Deetz during the years in which he was Assistant Director of the Plantation, 1967-78. Catherine Marten was responsible for much of the transcription, but Barbara Carson transcribed part of Volume 3, and Anne Yentsch was also involved in later years. Transcriptions were made from the originals held in the Plymouth County Commissioner's Office as well as from microfilm copies that were used for the initial transcripts, which were then proofed against the original documents in the Plymouth County Court House.

The transcription of wills and inventories by Plimoth Plantation made accessible to researchers an essential resource that at the time was available only in two other places, apart from the County Commissioner's Office in Plymouth. The first was The Mayflower Descendant, a Quarterly Magazine of Pilgrim Genealogy and History published by the Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants, Boston. Under the editorship of George E. Bowman, The Mayflower Descendant ("MD") published a full transcription of Volume 1 between 1889 and 1909, in MD volumes 1 through 11. The transcripts appeared in the section of the journal entitled Plymouth Colony Wills and Inventories. From 1910, only abstracts of wills and inventories in Volume 2 were published, appearing in MD volume 12, part 4 onwards. This policy did not, however, preclude Bowman from publishing in full inventories from Volumes 2, 3 or 4 according to demand from subscribers, and their willingness to pay the publication costs. By April 1916, in MD volumes 12 through 18 part 2, abstracts of all wills and inventories in the original Volume 2 had been completed. In July 1916, Bowman announced the beginning of a series of abstracts from the third volume of Wills and Inventories. By September 1937 abstracts had been published through Volume 3, Part 1, page 153. He never completed publication of Volume 3 in its entirety, or continued to Volume 4.

The transcripts that were published in The Mayflower Descendant are the first to be accessible to the general public in computerized form. In 1997 the Search & ReSearch Publishing Corporation, Wheat Ridge Colorado, made available for DOS, Windows and Macintosh a CD-ROM entitled the Mayflower Descendant Legacy. For the first time it is possible to access through a range of search features Volumes 1 through 34, 1899-1937, of The Mayflower Descendant and also Pilgrim Notes and Queries, Volumes 1 through 6, 1913-1917, and to print out copies of required material.

The University of Virginia's Plymouth Colony Archive Project, also presents a collection of searchable texts including some probate inventories and wills. The majority of inventories already published on our web site have been made available from a collection, mainly obtained from Plimoth Plantation, which Mary Ellin D'Agostino, of the Department of Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley, had scanned and edited into computer files as part of her doctoral research.

The second set of Plymouth Wills and Inventories to be compiled was at Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth, headquarters of the Pilgrim Society, in a separate project in the 1950's. The project was the basis for an unpublished 150p manuscript, Pilgrim Possessions as told by their Wills and Inventories, by Richard B. Bailey, Director of the Society at the time. Bailey had transcriptions made of the wills and inventories through 1659, from those published in The Mayflower Descendant, and then the different items listed in each will and/or inventory were classified under a set of headings which he devised, with the object of making the contents more accessible to scholars. The material was typed and bound into three volumes housed in the library of the Pilgrim Society.

In 1996, for the first time, some of the original Plymouth Colony Wills and Inventories were published in a single volume. Volumes 1 and 2, 1633 to 1669, appeared under the title Plymouth Colony Wills and Inventories, Vol. 1: 1633-1669, edited by C.H. Simmons (Picton Press, 1996). Volumes 3 and 4, 1670 through 1685, remain unpublished. Apart from the transcripts held at the office of the Plymouth County Commissioners in Plymouth, the only other complete sets which are available to researchers are those at Plimoth Plantation, where the library holds two sets of transcripts of the unpublished Plymouth Colony Wills and Inventories, volumes 3 and 4, 1670 through 1685. We hope to make the contents of the seven volumes of the Deetz collection available through future publication on this web site.

Notes on the Compilation of the Index

The date given in the index is, wherever possible, the date on which the inventory of the decedent was taken by the appraisers. The decision to follow this arrangement is based on the fact that the inventory was normally taken shortly after the death of a person, and as death dates are not always available, this provides, as it were, a terminus post quem for the artifacts contained in a household. If there is no appraisal date, usually that chosen will be the date on which the inventory was exhibited to the Court.

Wills are noted in the index before inventories although there are a few wills where no inventory of the possessions of the decedent appears to have been recorded, and quite often there are inventories, but no wills. Either none were made, or the inventories were not recorded by the clerk of the court. Some wills are nuncupative, i.e. made verbally by the testator, not in writing. These were later dictated or written down by someone who was present and could swear to the mind and will of the testator.

Occasionally there are letters of administration. After the death of a person, their will and an inventory of their possessions had to be proved by the Governor and Assistants at the next Court after their death, provided it was not in the same month that they died. Letters of administration would then be granted to the executor so that the estate could settled. If someone did not make a will, they died intestate, and after an inventory of their possessions had been taken the Court gave legal authority to someone, usually the wife, husband or close relative, through letters of administration, to settle the estate.

In the index, for ease of reference, the year in which a document was recorded is strictly according to the Gregorian calendar year, so where the date in the original document may read 15 January 1673/74, the year is simply given as 1674.

The town in which a decedent lived is sometimes given in the will or inventory. Where there is no indication, the information has been supplied from the Plymouth Colony Probate Guide: Where to find Wills and Related Data for 800 People of Plymouth Colony, 1620-1691. It was compiled by Ruth Wilder Sherman and Robert S. Wakefield, and published by the Plymouth Colony Research Group, Warwick, R.I. in 1983.

Guide to Dates and Terminology Used in the Wills & Inventories

Dates. Although we have used a simple dating system in the index, it is essential to become familiar with the system of dating in use in the seventeenth century, as the Plymouth Colony records were written when the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC, was the method of computing time followed by England, and her colonies. There were 365 days to the year, every fourth having 366 days. Due to errors in computation, in which one day extra every 128 years had been accumulated, in March 1582 Pope Gregory XIII corrected the Julian calendar, adding ten days to it, reckoning October 5 1582 to be October 15, and so introducing a new system which became known as the Gregorian calendar, which is still used today by western countries. The New Style, as it is called, was adopted by most Catholic countries, and by some Protestant from 1 January 1583, but England and her colonies did not adopt the new calendar until 1 January 1752, 169 years later. To complicate matters, in England, from the twelfth century, the ecclesiastical year had commenced on March 25 (Conception Day), and from the fourteenth century civilians had also adopted March 25 as the start of the civil and legal year, and this mode of expressing dates is known as the Old Style, as opposed to the New Style. What this comes down to, is that in Plymouth Colony the year was reckoned from March 25 through March 24, and so an event occurring on 27 February 1673 in the Gregorian calendar (and our modern calendar) would be in the Julian calendar year 1672.

The editors of the published Plymouth Colony Records introduced marginal double dates for events which took place between 1 January and 24 March inclusive, to make it quite clear as to the civil or historical year in which something took place. For example, the General Court held historically at Plymouth on 7 March 1637 is written as 1636-7. 1636 indicates the legal year in which the Court was held, and 1637 is the historical year in which it took place.

As March was the first month of the English ecclesiastical, civil and legal year, it was sometimes written as such in a document. January and February were the eleventh and twelfth months respectively. Thus January 1636-37 was the eleventh month of the legal year of 1636-37, but the following March was first Month of 1637-38, and the third month of the historical year of 1638.

Li or li. The monetary system in use in Plymouth Colony was English, and appraisers' values in the inventories are set out in pounds, shillings and pence, the columns often being headed as follows: "Li or li, s d" or "£ s d." At times a monetary amount will be written in the text using Roman numerals, as, for example, "xlli," which should be read as £40. The convention L before a numeral is also used, for example L100 meaning £100. Shillings are written as 10s = 10 shillings, and pence as 11d = eleven pence. There are twelve pence to a shilling, twenty shillings to a pound.

Roman numerals