A UNIQUE BLEND OF HISTORY AND EDITING
Yes, we know it’s unusual.
Our business is a marriage of fifty years of experience in the world of journalism
and thirty years of experience in the world of academia.
We research, we write, we edit.
And we gather historical data to compile individual and family histories.
How can we help you?
A passion for solving puzzles
The core of our work with historical data seeks to ‘solve Somerset’ (with thanks to John C. Lyon for coining the phrase). For an alarming number of years (pushing forty, if you must know), we have been gathering data about anybody who was born in, or died in, or lived in, or maybe just passed through colonial Somerset County, Maryland. And for good measure we’ve gathered a not-insignificant amount of data about some folks from elsewhere on the Delmarva Peninsula as well. All that data has given us many pieces of the giant jigsaw puzzle that is Colonial Somerset. Have a hankering to locate an early resident? Here’s a sample of resources we can compile for you:
Estate Inventories
Decedents & Bound Laborers ~ 1,870 Provincial Inventories & 9,133 Names (and not just Somerset County)
Wills
Wildly impressive numbers of records . . .
Administration Accounts
Decedents & Administrators/Executors ~ 980 Somerset County Accounts & 2,198 Names
Court Records
Wildly impressive numbers of records . . .
Land Records
All names extracted from nearly 2,500 Somerset County deeds for 1665-1722 ~ that’s almost 18,000 names!
Tax Records
Wildly impressive numbers of records . . .
And beyond that . . .
we offer linked data ~ assembled summaries of available information, for individuals and family groups
What’s New
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Tom Collins
I’m feeling a bit drunk from Tom Collins ~ and not in a good way. Seemed like a simple task: make an individual history page for Thomas Collins (?-1722). Yes . . . except there are roughly a jillion Collins people running around Somerset County in the middle of the eighteenth century,…
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An Object Lesson
My plan today was to add an ‘individual history’ page for Thomas Collins (?-1722) because yesterday I added an image of his administration account to one of my pages and I figured…
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Hold On To Your Hats
Well. I just listened in on an OIEAHC Coffeehouse about the Slave Societies Digital Archive [check it out here] and good golly, am I excited about the possibilities for my data. It’s…
Meet Our Team
Can you call two people a team? Sure, like in tennis! For thirty years we’ve been collaborating in various endeavors, and always with attention to good editing and good history.
J. Elliott Russo
Indexer, Writer, Historian
Michael Knisley
Editor, Writer, Journalist