On 22/05/2011 18:42, Richard Smith wrote: > On May 22, 12:08 pm, Nick Matthews<[email protected]> wrote: > >> A quick note on reference documents, ideally they would fit on a single >> sheet of paper. Whilst there's no actual limit on size, if the document >> is large the user should consider creating a summary to work from or >> breaking it down into extracts. > > The main example of a longer reference document that I can think of is > a will. When I'm transcribing a will, I try to resist the temptation > to summarise it, as there have been plenty of times when the seemingly- > irrelevant information I would have omitted has turned out to be > useful. On one occasion, I established that the farm left to a son in > a 18th century will was the same farm whose copyhold was held a > century earlier by someone of the same surname according to the > manorial records. On another the particular church where the person > chose to be buried turned out to be the village he had likely grown up > in, and where his parents were from. > > Richard > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message > > I would always put a will in full, even if I also do a summary. I find wills, with their arcane legal language and lack of punctuation, very difficult sometimes so a summary helps to show other people (or my future self) how I've interpreted it. The other extreme in reference document size is a single line from a register or index. Nick