Wishing Technology Would Catch Up

 

In researching more on my 4th great grandfather Christian Echard and newly discovered wife Sarah Patterson Echard, I came across a court case that dates back to 1850. Evidently Christian died without a will which when he was on his second spouse at the time of his death, both with kids, left some confusion as to who gets what. The file is composed of 98 pages of script, most of it much more illegible than the sample shown above, and written in lawyer-ese which makes it very difficult for my reptilian brain to understand. I know it related to my line because I can clearly make out my 3rd great grandmother mentioned by name, Sarah Jane Echard Ware throughout the documents but not really the finer details of what happened. Included among the script filled pages were two newspaper clippings dating back to the 1850's about the sale of Christian's property and a letter written by Sarah to her uncle Peter about the money she received as part of her inheritance. 

I have tried transcribing some to see if I can understand more but it has been very tedious and slow and there are enough words I can't decipher to even grasp the full context. So I went online to look for AI software that might do the same. The free ones I have tried have been even worse than my efforts. Ones that I can buy for a lot of dollars that promise great results after you spend 4 TO 6 WEEKS! training it for each script style are also available. I'm not really that interested. 

The single page above caught my attention because it had a drawn in map of Christian's property along the Middle River in Augusta County, Virginia near Spring Hill. I expect with enough time and patience, I could match that map up to an actual satellite image and know more specifically, where he lived when he was alive. However, I think that, and deciphering all the script, is a project best left for another day, perhaps when A.I. script interpreting software is father along. So for now, I'm filing it electronically away and moving onward in my quest to document all my researched ancestors.

P.S. The "leaf icon" click happy folks on Ancestry all concur that Christian Echard died in 1858, 8 years after this case first entered the court system and the papers I have deciphered all mention his various orphans in 1850. Yet another reason to never trust someone else's "research". 

P.S.S. Since originally writing this post, I found three newspaper articles essentially transcribing the court case for me. When Christian died on 28 Dec 1847, his land was split up. Some went to his widowed second wife Lydia Treavy Echard as dower and the rest was sold at auction with the proceeds split between the five children. Lydia didn't have long to live and died in 1856, also without a will, so her dower land was subsequently sold and divided up among the five children too. The article also mentions the name changes of my 3rd great grandmother Sarah Jane Echard to Sarah Jane Ware as she married in the intervening years.