Preserve Brown Estate v. Samuel Bonnell.

Teammates,

Here is another one of the documents that I was able to analyze on the plane last week.  This is a court case for the Preserve Brown Estate v. Samuel Bonnell.  If you remember, indebtedness to the Preserve Brown estate is what eventually led, in 1766, to the complete confiscation of Jacob Wright's goods.  Both of these cases appeared to start at about the same time (~1760 - 1761).  It will take a manual search through the unindexed Middlesex County Court records to see if there was a similar result with the Bonnells just before the Wright/Bonnell exodus.  In this case, it is not clear whether the signature on the Writing Obligatory is that of Samuel or the scribe.  I think it was probably the latter.  If the former, however, the "Sam'l Bonnell" construction seems to more closely match the Senior Bonnell on the 1756 document.  What is clear on this document is that you didn't want to get into debt trouble in pre-Revolutionary times.  If the original debt didn't crush you, the court costs sure would.  

I have no issue with anything George said today in response to the increment 3 document.  He is absolutely right that we do not yet have enough information to properly untangle the senior from the junior, although I hope the rest of the documents in my stack will start to shed some light on the issue.

By the way, the document sent earlier today (with Samuel Bonnell as the juror) was from 1764, in case you didn't want to calculate out the "year of the reign" of George III. 

John Bunnell