David Greene states that Edward Bishop the husband of Bridget and Edward Bishop Sr of Beverly/ Salem Village signed their names with different marks. He gets much of this from certain receipts. On Jan 21, 1695, he gave receipts to Job Hilliard and Susanna Mason, on which he signed his name with "X". Greene states that Edward Bishop Sr of Beverly signed his name with a mark too, but a different mark; "EB". Does anyone know where one would view these signatures? The different marks would arouse my suspicion that they were different people, but is not conclusive evidence, since I have found that there really isn't any pattern to how people who could not write their names signed them. Signatures with an X and initials are not necessarily two different people. I can't find any underlying logic to why someone who could form letters, as in "EB" didn't learn to write their names, and suspect that these people could write but thought it beyond their proper status or something, especially when they were women from families I know had mood disorders, which describes the Bishops and also everyone Bridget Bishop ever connected to by marriage, and everyone they connected to by marriage. I know that people often learned only to sign their names in order to appear literate or to sign documents; my grandmother as an Episcopal missionary in an isolated Appalachian village around 1914 once spent an evening teaching all of the men of the village to sign their names so that they could sign bank documents. I have ancestors who followed this pattern of making hieroglyphs that consisted partly of as many as four well formed letters. Often it is clear that someone else made the "X", and often it is clear from the handwriting that the clerk signed an illiterate man's document for him in his name, which was done very often with men's signatures. If they did that, they could have signed X and EB depending on the inclination of the particular clerk. There may be more information to be had by examining the receipts; for instance, one may be able to see if the two marks were made by people with quite different personalities, or if the clerks even sometimes made the marks. Yours, Dora Smith