New information inDEED ....

This past summer/fall I started corresponding via email with a Gray cousin, Todd, that my Uncle Gary had told me about. After a bit of back and forth emails it turns out that we are 3rd cousins.  I sent him some documents I have on Capt Jesse, like the will, pictures, etc, and he sent me this page, which at first appeared to be a deed to some land in Florida with Capt Jesse's signature on it.   It turned out that it was actually a petition Capt Jesse was making in an attempt to get compensation for the house and horse he'd had to abandon when he left Florida to move to Nova Scotia.  Compensation for this was not granted because he couldn't provide the necessary receipts, deeds, or other required proof of ownership.

It's pretty faint and hard to read but I'll attempt to transcribe it here:

William Mangum and Robert Clark  ? ? and examined the? above claim.

Wm Mangum knew Jesse Gray in East Florida that he lived at St Johns Bluff in a house which was said to be his property.  That said Gray owned ? ? house which he supposes to be worth fifty pounds sterling.  Robert Clark also knew Gray at St Johns Bluff that he owned a horse there worth in his estimation seventy pounds sterling and they both say he lost this house and horse upon the ? of East Florida when he removed to Nova Scotia.

The foregoing Examinations

taken in Council at Halifax

this 7th of January 17?9 before one

(signed by) William Mangum, Robert Clark, Jesse Gray  

I'm still plugging away at documenting all of the cemeteries that I photographed in May, though it's slow work.  So far I've finished Plymouth, and started Kempt Corner and the Hatfield Cemetery on the Gray Road, also in Kemptville.  As with anything else historical, there are some people who have also been working on documenting them and have not done their research, thereby linking up names that have no business being linked up, or inserting speculative or false information.  That really annoys me.  It's frustrating enough to not be able to find something or hit a roadblock in researching, but it's worse still when people go tumbling along all willy-nilly, making assumptions or just plain making things up.  This is partly why it's taking me so long to get my own documentation done.  For each entry I put on FindaGrave.com I am checking and double checking the information in my own family tree (for those that I am related to, which are a LOT), plus I go into the NS Historical Vital Statistics site and check information there, like parentage, dates, etc.  It's a long, slow process, but I believe that anything worth doing is worth doing well.