Ohio, Wyandot County Deed Record, "Deeds 1865-1866", page 595 — deed of Samuel Cooper of Wyandot County to Francis Beidler, executed 16 February 1866, for the west half of the east half of Out Lot 94 in the town of Upper Sandusky; FamilySearch DGS 007209601 image 304 of 329.

What this document records

✅✅ register control dgs 7209601 distinguishes

CONTROL RUN 2026-09-27. On the facing deed of this same opening — Ebenezer Baughman and Mary his wife to Leonard Mavis, 13 Feb 1866 — the subscriptions read Ebenezer Baughman (Seal), the name written out, and beneath it Mary with her above and mark below a +, Baughman (Seal). Crop-verified at 3×. ⇒ One opening, one clerk: a signature as a name, a mark as a mark — and this deed's own Samuel Cooper written out. So the Samuel signature recorded here is a real reading, not a clerical normalisation. [K.104] is on the same DGS (7209601) and is covered by the same control. What this does and does not do: it confirms the reading. It does not revive literacy as a discriminator among the Samuels — Samuel Cooper records that test as falsified, because every Samuel execution line in the catalog is a signature.

The marginal caption verbatim

Samuel Cooper / And to / Francis Beidler — read at 3.8×.

The granting clause verbatim

Read at 3.8× across four band crops: "Know all men by these presents that Samuel Cooper of Wyandot County Ohio in Consideration of One hundred and ninety dollars to him paid by Francis Beidler the Receipt whereof is hereby ac[knowledged] … do hereby grant Bargain Sell and Convey to the Said Francis Beidler his heirs and assigns forever the following tract or parcel of Land Situated in Wyandot County Ohio to wit Being the west half of the East half of Out Lot Number Ninety four (94) in the town of Upper Sandusky in said County…" The habendum and covenant follow in the standard form — "and the said Samuel Cooper for himself and for his heirs Executors and administrators doth hereby covenant with the said Francis Beidler" that he is "the true and lawful owner" with "full power to convey", and will "Warrant and defend the same".

The date verbatim

"…this Sixteenth day of February in the Year of our Lord one thousand Eight hundred and Sixty Six" — the day and month crop-verified at 3.1×. The year is carried by the volume caption and the recording note.

The property

A TOWN LOT, NOT FARMLAND. The west half of the east half of Out Lot 94, town of Upper Sandusky — the county seat — for $190. This matters for the identification: every previously catalogued Wyandot Cooper conveyance is agricultural, described by section, township and range (e.g. [K.98]'s N½ W½ SE¼ Sec. 12 T1S R14).

What is not crop verified

Recorded here from the full-text OCR only, and flagged as such rather than omitted because they are navigational: the witnesses (OCR "Elale Henry W Host Leake" — probably Henry W. Hoyt and another), the acknowledgment before George Myers, Justice of the Peace on the same 16 February 1866, and the filing and recording notes (OCR suggests filed and recorded February 1866, with W. S. Revenue Stamps "of the value of fifty cents duly cancelled"). One more pass over the lower third of the page at 3× would settle all of them.

The identification problem

WHICH SAMUEL COOPER — genuinely open, and the deed does not help. For Samuel Cooper Samuel Cooper of Tymochtee: he was alive in February 1866 (d. 23 Aug 1871), he is the Samuel Cooper the catalog already has conveying Wyandot land — "10/27/1851 Samuel → Moses A Quinn 5/564" per [K.100]'s abstract of the Cott grantor index — and he had taken a quitclaim from Israel Cooper in 1845 ([K.98]). Against it: the property is a town out-lot in Upper Sandusky, not the Tymochtee farmland of [K.98] and the 1851 Quinn deed; and the 1860 census puts a second New-Jersey-born "Saml Cooper, b. 1814" in Sycamore Twp in the same county (artifact on disk: (archive file)), a man the catalog has never worked. ⇒ The subjects: row is provisional and no fact reaches Samuel Cooper's header.

Why the missing township is not evidence

Do not read "of Wyandot County" as implying there was only one Samuel Cooper in the county. The recital is a venue formula — it fixes a party's domicile for jurisdictional purposes — not a disambiguator. The control is on this very opening. Every other party recited on pages 594-595 is identified by county alone: "Ebenezer Baughman and Mary Baughman of the County of Wyandot State of Ohio", "Leonard Marvin of the County of Crawford State of Ohio", and the Schilling deed's premises "in the Town of Upper Sandusky County of Wyandot and State of Ohio". [K.100]'s Israel deed does the same: "Israel Cooper of the county of Wyandott and State of Ohio". (The neighbouring recitals are read from the full-text OCR, not crop-verified — they are used here as evidence about the FORM of the page, not as data about any Cooper.) ⇒ A county-only recital is the expected form, so its presence is uninformative — equally consistent with one Samuel Cooper in Wyandot County or with five. What WOULD be informative is a qualifier, and there is none. Deeds distinguish namesakes ("Senior", "Junior", "the elder", a middle initial, an occupation) when the two men collide in the chain of title for that particular parcel — that is the only thing that creates drafting pressure. Two Samuels in different townships holding different land never collide, so a scrivener who knew both had no reason to separate them here. And the hand that wrote this is a recording clerk copying an original; he adds the filing note, not identifications. ⇒ The identification must come from the chain of title, not the recital: find the deed by which this Samuel ACQUIRED out-lot 94 (a Wyandot GRANTEE search, never run in this catalog), or from the grantor/grantee indexes, which are where clerks do sometimes disambiguate because an index is exactly where namesakes collide.