I keep meaning to write an entry about why I'm bad at this job and handwriting would have to be top of that list. I can. Not. read. It. Barbara seems to decipher the scrawl-iest, faded writing so easily that I'm starting to think it's something with me. But today's rabbit hole would have been SO much less time-intensive if I could tell what these papers said!
Anyway - Today was another attempt to clear out the "I have no clue" folder, this time uncovering the melodramatic saga of the Grants and the Wheelers.
Why did this take me so long?
- Names - lots of names, clearly written (unlike the facts of the case)… none belonging to our canonical families. Because these papers involved a court case and included legal documents I assumed that at some point! I'd stumble across a Burnap or Hyde serving as witness or justice. That just never happened.
- Drama - the papers involved a property dispute that took place in 1835 and was not finally resolved until 1908. In addition, documents are included in evidence from as far back as 1772. From a distance, it looks like two neighbors bickering over petty things for ¾ of a century. This is the kind of soap opera drama I can really sink my teeth into.
- Pictures! - there are at least 3, maybe 4 maps and surveys in this collection, which was a wonderful variation from the monotony of last week's Emily letters.
- Handwriting (aforementioned). Because this sounds like a juicy story I was genuinely interested to figure out what was going on. Unfortunately, affidavits and shorthand recordings of testimony are so hard to read and are by nature one-sided. I was not getting the full story from any one sample of these papers. In fact I still don't really understand what the fight was about. I realized it was taking me 5-10 minutes to make sense of a single page, and I started to feel ridiculous sitting there, clearly not "working".
Here's what I know:
The Grant family originally owned the entire farmland in question as far back as 1772. At some point the Wheeler family bought an adjacent farm. At some other point a turnpike road was installed crossing both families land. This is where it gets hazy. There was a fence- someone knocked down the fence or was supposed to fix it and didn't, or maybe the built a fence so that the other family could not access the road? There were questions of access - who owned what and who could and could not be on what road. It seems that the Wheelers might have taken advantage of the turnpike's construction to block of land rightfully owned by the Grant family. At least, that was the final, sad coda in 1908. Included in this stack of papers is a probate report after the death without heirs of Edwin H. Grant in 1890. It took the Norwich Probate court 18 years to figure out what to do with the land.
What could I do differently?
Again, Turn off my brain. I have to stop getting personally invested in some of these stories. In this case, my own family has a very similar Jarndyce & Jarndyce-type court case through my grandfather's property in northern Wisconsin. He owned three lots, built a long driveway (small road) through the woods to his house then sold all but the middle lot, so technically the driveway bisects the neighbor's land, but my grandfather had an easement to use that road. Well, 30 years later we're still fighting with the neighbors over 3 feet of swampland. It's the principle of the thing! So naturally I was delighted to see my own families petty behavior reflected in papers from 195 years ago. But obviously, if I were to be doing this professionally and on a schedule I can't go emotionally connecting with every little thing like I have been this fall. It's emotionally draining if nothing else!