Class Bias in Probate Records

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sat Aug 24 15:02:50 PDT 2002


***** Probate records as an historical source

Michael A. Bellesiles

...The issue is further confused by the fact that probate practices changed over time. Studies in Colonial Massachusetts estimate the percentage of deceased inventories at between 25% and 90%, with Kevin Sweeney's study of Wethersfield, Connecticut, indicating that 70% of the town's taxpayers in 1673 were inventoried, compared to 50% in 1773. (43) Those not counted form a long list: "most women, most native Americans, most soldiers, and all transients, sojourners, children, apprentices, live-in relations, servants or slaves and their families." (44) These are the poorest Americans. In Concord, Massachusetts, between 1653 and 1700, 281 deaths were recorded in the public records, with fifteen additional known deaths not recorded. Of this number, 45 men and four women (16.5%) were inventoried. (45) Philip Greven found probate records for 45% of the deceased taxpayers in Andover, Massachusetts. (46) Daniel Scott Smith's study of eighteenth-century Hingham, Massachusetts found inventories for 42% of the adult men and 4% of the women. (47) John Waters likewise found inventories for 45% of the adult males in his sample from eighteenth-century Guilford, Connecticut. (48) Alice Hanson Jones felt that just 32.7% of "potential wealth holders" were inventoried in New England in 1774. (49) In contrast, Jackson Turner Main wrote that probate inventories were available for 80% of the adult male decedents in seventeenth-century Connecticut. (50)

But these scholars are not always talking about the same things. Some are using sample sets of populations, others the complete population, others just taxpayers or Jones' "potential wealth holders," making these percentages difficult to compare. Sweeney and Smith have found a clear class bias in probate inventories, with the wealthiest being most likely to be inventoried. In Scott's study, 78.3% of the top 40% measured by taxable wealth are inventoried, but just 13.8% of the bottom 20%. Both of these scholars therefore feel that probate records may show more property than is normal. (51) In terms of this particular study, then, those most likely to own guns and books are most often inventoried....

... One-third of the bottom 30% (21 of 66) of inventories Hawley studied contained firearms, with guns appearing in 74% of the top 10% of the inventories examined (16 of 22). (77). Hawley is the only other historian with whom I am familiar who has addressed the question of gun ownership in the probate records. Finding far fewer than she had expected, she speculates, "Appraisers in Surry County may have selectively omitted the guns of poor men from their inventories so that their heirs could meet their civic responsibility." (78) But since guns could not be seized for the payment of a debt, it is not clear why such concealment would be necessary. Hawley assumes that since the law required that men have arms for militia service that they must have had them. But she also notes "nor are there any known cases of presentment before the court for failure to have the requisite equipment." (79)...

...43.Kevin M. Sweeney, "Furniture and the Domestic Environment in Wethersfield, Connecticut, 1639-1800," Connecticut Antiquarian 36 (1984): 10-39. Sweeney's study is based on 786 inventories.

44.Benes, ed., Early American Probate Inventories, 11.

45.Ibid.

46.Philip Greven, Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, NY, 1970).

47.Daniel Scott Smith, "Underregistration and Bias in Probate Records: An Analysis of Data from Eighteenth-Century Hingham, Massachusetts." William and Mary Quarterly 32 (1975): 104.

48.John Waters, "Patrimony, Succession, and Social Stability: Guilford, Connecticut in the Eighteenth Century," Perspectives in American History 10 (1976): 138.

49.Alice Hanson Jones, "Wealth Estimates for the New England Colonies about 1770." Journal of Economic History 32 (1972): 116.

50.Jackson Turner Main, Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut (Princeton, 1985), 48, 60-61.

51.Sweeney, "Using Tax Lists to Detect Biases in Probate Inventories," in Benes, ed., Early American Probate Inventories, 35-36; Smith, "Underregistration and Bias in Probate Records," 105....

76.Anna L. Hawley, "The Meaning of Absence: Household Inventories in Surry County, Virginia, 1690-1715," in Benes, ed., Early American Probate Inventories, 23-31.

77.Ibid., 27-28.

78.Ibid.

79.Ibid., 28n.

<http://www.emory.edu/HISTORY/BELLESILES/webprobate.update1.html> *****

As one of Bellesiles's primary historical sources for evidence of the scarcity of guns in pre-Civil-War America is probate records, it is possible that gun ownership was even less widespread than _Arming America_ suggests. -- Yoshie

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