Ohio, Wyandot County Deed Record, "Deeds 1865-1866", page 426 — deed of James Cray of Wyandot County to Samuel Cooper of the same place, executed 28 November 1865, for the west half of the east half of Out Lot 94 in the town of Upper Sandusky; FamilySearch DGS 007209601 image 562.

What this document records

The marginal caption verbatim

James Cray / Deed to / Samuel Cooper — read at ~5×.

The granting clause verbatim

Read in 3.1× band crops: "Know all men by these presents that I James Cray of the County of Wyandot Ohio in consideration of the sum of One hundred and Seventy five Dollars in hand paid by Samuel Cooper of the same place have bargained and sold and do hereby grant bargain sell and convey unto the said Samuel Cooper his heirs and assigns forever the following Lands and tenements situate in the County of Wyandot and State of Ohio to wit: The west half of the East half of Out Lot No Ninety four (No 94) in the Town of Upper Sandusky in the County and State aforesaid" The habendum and warranty follow in the standard form — James Cray covenanting that "he is lawfully seized", that the premises are "free and clear from all incumbrances whatever", and that he "will forever warrant and defend the same".

The dates verbatim

Executed: "this 28th day of Novem[ber] 1865" — day and month crop-verified at ~3.1×. Recording: "Filed on the 14th and Recorded on the 26th day of December A.D. 1865" — both day figures crop-verified at ~3.1×. Acknowledged before the Justice of the Peace on the same 28 November 1865, and endorsed with revenue stamps to the value of about 50 cents, "duly cancelled" — both read at ~0.5× only. Recorder subscribed as Simeon Furman, Recorder W.C.O. (also 0.5× only; the same recorder signs [K.101]).

The hypothesis this deed was pulled to test

TESTED, AND THE ANSWER IS NO. This deed does not identify which Samuel Cooper either. The reasoning that led here was sound and is worth preserving. [K.101] showed that the selling deed recites only "Samuel Cooper of Wyandot County Ohio", and established that a county-only recital is the normal form and therefore uninformative. The inference was that the acquiring deed — a different instrument, a different scrivener, eleven weeks earlier — would be an independent second recital and might be fuller. It is not fuller; it is thinner. The grantee is recited as "Samuel Cooper of the same place" — a back-reference to James Cray's own "County of Wyandot Ohio". ⇒ it adds no locative information at all, and cannot separate Samuel Cooper of Tymochtee from the New-Jersey-born "Saml Cooper, b. 1814" of Sycamore Twp. Recording the negative deliberately. The prediction was explicit and is now falsified; without writing that down the same deed would be pulled again. And the general lesson is the useful part: "of the same place" is a standard scrivener's economy, so the second deed in a chain is systematically LESS likely to locate a party than the first. ⇒ when the question is which man, prefer a deed where he is the first-named party.

What it did give

1. The price, and therefore the shape of the transaction. Bought for $175 on 28 Nov 1865; sold to Francis Beidler for $190 on 16 Feb 1866 ([K.101]). ⇒ a $15 gain over eleven weeks on a half-of-a-half town out-lot. That is not a residence and not a farm — it is a turn, and it is the first evidence in the catalog of any Cooper here dealing in town property for gain. It bears on the identification only softly: a man who flips an Upper Sandusky out-lot is a marginally better fit for a townsman than for a Tymochtee farmer, but Samuel Cooper was a farmer who also held two small out-of-township parcels in Sec. 18 and 19 ([K.103]), so he is not excluded. 2. A correction to how the Cott index must be read — see below. 3. Names for the neighbourhood: the grantor James Cray ([name.612]), who signs with a seal rather than a mark, and the officiating Justice of the Peace.

The cott index date column is unreliable

A METHODOLOGICAL CORRECTION THAT AFFECTS EVERY ROW OF [K.102] AND [K.103]. The Cott grantee index gives this instrument's date as 12/26/1865 in a column printed "Date of Instrument". The deed is dated 28 November 1865; 26 December 1865 is the RECORDING date, written plainly at the foot of the entry. And the index is not consistently wrong — [K.101]'s row reads 2/16/1866, which is that deed's execution date. ⇒ the column sometimes holds the instrument date and sometimes the recording date, with nothing on the page to say which. Consequence: every date in [K.102] and [K.103] must be treated as either the instrument or the recording date, ±1 month, until the deed itself is read. This matters most where a date is doing argumentative work — e.g. the 1835 joint purchase by Israel and Samuel ([K.103]) could have been executed in 1834, and the two administrators' sales (1888, 1901) could sit a month either side of the dates given.

How the page was located

Worth recording as method, because the obvious route fails. The item-scoped full-text viewer numbers this volume "of 329", while the film-browse viewer numbers the whole film "of 672" — so an item image number is not a film image number, and interpolating from one in the other misses by hundreds. The fix is to calibrate on a known plate. Loading [K.101]'s ark with no i parameter resolved to film image 647, which the full-text viewer had called item image 304 ⇒ film image = item image + 343. From there, page 595 at film image 647 and two book pages per opening put page 426 at film image ≈ 562 — which proved exact on the first try. FamilySearch's catalog search endpoint was returning "Something Went Wrong" throughout, and the Wyandot deed films are not full-text indexed, so neither of the easy routes was available.