SAMPLE REPORT

 

 

    Below is the first page of one of my reports.  Numbers in bold face refer to the individual, numbered documents (deeds, probate copies, plots, etc.) that were included with my report.     (In this particular case, the owners had no idea who had constructed the house.)

 

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Owners of 21 South Street, Shrewsbury, MA                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

by Harvey H. Schmidt, Title Examiner

Worcester County Old House Histories

 

                 All of my research on this property indicates that it may rightly be called the “Abraham Wheelock House.”  Land and probate records filed in Worcester County Courthouse tell very little about Wheelock.  He was identified in three relevant deeds (in 1829, 1830, & 1834--see below) as a “Cordwainer,” or shoemaker.  A somewhat later deed (1835) identified him as “yeoman” (“a freeholder…who worked his own land”), so he may eventually have become more a farmer than a tradesman.  (The inventory of his personal estate, filed after his death in 1870, however, lists “shoemaker’s bench and tools,” so he may have maintained his original trade to some extent for most of his life.)

               

                His date of birth is uncertain—it is shown variously in genealogical records as 1800 and 1804.  He died in Shrewsbury on 28 April 1870—see his probate file at [9].  What is known is that he first purchased real estate in Shrewsbury, on the east side of “town road no. 2”—now South Street-- in 1829 from Col. Nymphas Pratt, the uncle of his first wife, Catherine Hill (nee Pratt), by deed at B. 269, p. 609 [1].  The land described in that deed consisted of about ½-acre and appears to be a small parcel below (south of) where the house now stands.  A year later Nymphas Pratt conveyed to Wheelock a +/- ½-acre lot that adjoined the first lot to the north by deed at 276, 313 [2].  Both lots are plotted at [3].

 

                I think it is unlikely that either lot contained any sort of dwelling.  Both lots were described simply as “a tract of land,” and the stated price for each lot was $50.  It is possible that the lot conveyed in 1829 (south of the current house lot) contained a shop of some sort.  A small building is shown in that location in the 1870 Shrewsbury atlas map [8], though that may have been a later addition.  I think it is very likely that the current house was constructed between 1830 and 1832;  the 1832 Shrewsbury atlas map [4] shows a house owned by “A. Wheelock” in that location. 

 

(Note also in the same map the name “N Pratt” by a house on the north side of Main Street, opposite the beginning of South Street.  Nymphas Pratt purchased the property, with a “dwelling house, bark house…and slurry shop,” i.e., for a tannery, in 1803—for $1500-- from his father, Seth Pratt, by deed at 152, p. 560 [27].  Just east of the house in the same map is a structure labeled “tannery.”  Seth Pratt is shown in Harlow’s “History of Shrewsbury” as the earliest operator of a tannery and currier business in the town.  This verifies that Nymphas Pratt’s own house was on this location, and that the land he owned on South Street--however he may have come by it--contained no dwelling.)

 

                In 1834 Abraham Wheelock purchased—for $20--from Nymphas Pratt a 14 ½-foot wide strip of land that ran along the north line of his houses lot by deed at 301, 480 [5].  I believe the reason for this conveyance is that Wheelock discovered the description of the land conveyed in 276, 313 [2] was defective—note that in the plot at [3] the final course of 9 ½ rods along the road is exactly 14 ½ feet short of closing.