Middlesex County, Massachusetts Deponents, 1651-1700

The Middlesex County Court Folios, a massive collection of unpublished court documents dating from 1651, is currently in the custody of the Judicial Archives and is stored at the Massachusetts Archives at Columbia Point. No satisfactory index of the collection has yet been made. The following index is not an index to all deponents in the Middlesex court records. Only those depositions where the deponent's age was stated are indexed here. Children as young as 10 years old and seniors in their late eighties were brought to court to bear witness in matters as diverse as swearing and murder. Native American, African, Dutch, Irish, and English residents of Middlesex County are represented here, as well as sailors who were just passing through from distant ports. Overall, this online database contains the names of more than 5,200 deponents from the folios. Indexing and Publication: No satisfactory index to these records exists. A "quick and dirty" index of court cases was placed on file cards by Harvard Law School students in the 1930s after a quick sort that organized the loose papers into folios. Neither the index nor the organization was flawless, but a photostatic copy of the first twenty years of the surviving papers was made before WWII. This photostat has been microfilmed and is available for purchase through Harvard University. The original papers in the series (number reduced by decay, neglect, and outright theft) have been microfilmed several times and copies may be purchased, with permission from the Judicial Archivist, from the LDS Church. Microfilms are also available at the Massachusets Archives at Columbia Point and on loan at LDS Family History Centers worldwide. However, in the course of using these microfilms, it becomes obvious that the case index is defective and that the most genealogically valuable information has not been indexed at all. Some records pertaining to probate matters are being published in the NEHGS series on early Middlesex probate records (ISBN 0-88082-099-3), edited by Robert Rogers. Some of the more outrageous cases have been abstracted and mentioned in Roger Thompson's Sex in Middlesex (ISBN 0-87023-516-8). Beyond random abstracts of these cases in dissertations and genealogies, most of the materials remain unpublished. Within the Database: For many decades, it was common practice for a person making a deposition to identify himself or herself by name, title (if any), and age. This format was not always followed, unfortunately, and phrases like "of lawful age" might have been substituted for an exact number. Often, when a person well known to the officers of the court came forward to give evidence, the formality of stating an age was dispensed with entirely. While most of court cases dealt with debts, it is sometimes possible to predict with some accuracy the nature of the case based on the age of the deponent. Women over 50 were most frequently called to give evidence in matters of childbirth. Elderly men were most often deposed about property boundary lines or land use. Young children were sometimes the only witnesses to violent crimes such as rape or assault, but were also relied upon to identify cattle or horses. The Middlesex County Court Folios were arranged more or less chronologically, so that, given the year a deposition was made, the interested researcher can locate the actual deposition by examining the folios that span the year given in the present index. In some instances, a very old deposition will be found in a much later court case, as in the case of appeals. The year given in this index is the year in which the deposition was made, and not necessarily the year in which the court sat.