26 March 2012

Who Is the Witness?

I've decided to revisit my Irish forebears in an attempt to learn more about them before their life in New Brunswick--particularly my gg-grandmother, Annie Murphy Neill. This is a copy of the marriage bond signed by her husband Samuel Neill and Edward Durbin. Durbin does not appear to have been related to the family (he was born in England--the Neills were both Irish and his wife was not a Murphy or Neill before her marriage).

I realized that I had never researched the witness on this bond--who could easily just be a warm body or someone of significance. The difficulty is in reading the name.

My guess is that the last name is Drury, but the initials are more of a mystery.

This image came from the microfilmed copy of the marriage bonds at the Family History Library--obtained from the New Brunswick Provincial Archives.

In hindsight, I wish I knew whether the document that was filmed was the original bond or a transcription of it. I'm glad that I know where I got this record, but now I need to know where the "microfilmer" got it as well.

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3 comments:

  1. Bubba12:04 PM

    A quick look at the ending "y" in the name of the witness and several places in the script within the document seems to indicate that the same person who wrote the name of the witness also wrote the script within the bond itself.

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  2. Grandma Cantrell5:26 PM

    Could the last name be Dewey? Just a guess.

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  3. Bubba3:18 PM

    I thought that for a while too, but it appears to have been Drury. There was a man with that last name who appears in the 1871 New Brunswick Census as a local government employee.

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