Long-Lost Rhode Island Colonial Records Found

Question

Colonial court records, long believed lost and dating from 1746 to 1749, were discovered for sale on eBay. A judge blocked their sale and they have been returned to Rhode Island.

The pages are delicate, frayed and browned with age, covered in elegant looping script. They document the comings and goings in Providence County court some 270 years ago, telling of a Native American man being sentenced to 15 lashes at a whipping pole for stealing paper money while drunk and other cases. They are peppered with some of Rhode Island’s most prominent family names: Greene, Arnold, Perry, Angell and Lippitt.

The eBay listing mentioned these individuals: Stephen Hopkins, Nathaniel Greene, Solomon Drowne, Jabez Bowen and Thomas Arnold, as well as other family names such as Jenckes, Tillinghast, Perry, Waterman and Ward. 

http://www.providencejournal.com/news/20180316/judge-blocks-ebay-sale-of-ri-colonial-court-records​

Comments

I hope the records might shed more insight into some of these families. I believe Bowen-4574, Drowne-43 and several others mentioned above might benefit from these records. I hope they are photographed and/or transcribed so we all may have access to their potentially rich information.

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$10 for a wealth of historical and genealogical material!

Perhaps if it had been sold on E-Bay the purchaser would have donated it.

Thank You for this alert!

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At $10 I can see someone donating it, but it was up to $960 by the time the judge intervened. Not a lot of people have the ability to protect these documents from further deterioration. Sometimes people buy things like this and have no clue as to their value as a complete artifact and they chop them up and frame or otherwise use parts of them and discard part they "have no use for."

I guess now we need to spend more time checking for this kind of stuff on eBay. Who knew?

Answer 1

Thanks for posting.  I hope they transcribe them too.

Answer 2

Thanks for sharing.  Some ancestral names there for me, especially Waterman.