"No, the committee is presumably a subset of the General Court, but every member of the General Court is the Deputy of his respective town. To put it another way, presumably every committee member was a deputy, but surely not every deputy was a committee member." Based on what evidence? The references to deputies I saw in the Plymouth Records indicated that they were strictly tools of the court i.e. officials who brought evidence against suspects for court proceedings. I fear Mr. Chandler is reading democracy into a situation that had none. The question remains how they were appointed, although I suspect either way they served the interests of the Plymouth Court and not their own community interests. I fear William Carpenter realized that the hard way. You could only have realized that by reading all the books and not a FHL microfilm. BC