Anna, in this case, this has nothing to do with spellcheck....the will I posted is exactly as found in the document on the CD of abstracted PA wills....I can only assume that those who transcribed the original documents for the CDs differed in the way they transcribed what they saw....personally, I imagine the people working on the documents saw the word dec'd and some transcribed that as decembered, rather than those who saw it as an abbreviation for the word deceased and left it as dec'd. Apparently not everything was transcribed by the same person, as dec'd does appear in many of the wills. I, too, am a firm believer in transcribing a document EXACTLY as it is, with NO exceptions......readers may make whatever interpretations they wish, but not so the transcribers. As I've said before, a transcription does NOT promise to be anything other than an exact copy of the original.......warts and all. S. " When I was learning about abstracted/abstracting documents [Wills, Deeds, etc.], I was taught that you should use the exact spelling from within the document. Doing that would leave the interpretation of dec'd to the reader. The context in a Will certainly would seem to indicate deceased as Sandra and Ginnie have suggested, I, purposely, do not use spell check because of its insensitivity to rules of grammar. "