Thursday 4th February 2010 - Another Day in Court

          Today is courthouse day.  I am well prepared: I know Birmingham is a big city, so I expect the artillery will want to look up my bottom.  I even leave my trusty Swiss Army knife in the care of Silver.  When I get in, the records are well hidden away, but I manage to worm my way in and get some free advice from the goodly supply of grown-up ladies.

          They have those rather frightening shelving systems where, although there are lots of shelves, there is only one corridor in between them, and you have to roll them along till the corridor is beside the shelf you want.  I'm pretty sure someone will jam me inside them and I'll never be seen again.  I comfort myself with the thought that I will haunt the grown-up ladies mercilessly.

          The map book contains a couple of "Glasgow Additions" to Adamsville, which is what I thought I wanted, but they are much too recent.  In fact, Glasgow comes up as though it's not part of anywhere else at all.

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Unfortunately, nobody lays claim to the land to which the map refers (the "property of" refers, I think, to the map).

          There will no doubt be many deeds which refer to this map, but it does not refer to any of them.  I guess that the sellers in such deeds will be Glasgows.  The index to the deed books is computerised, so I spend the afternoon looking at computer copies of old indices.  It's not very good, but I've done this before with microfilm, and this is much better.  After a few hours, I have a good list of deed references to chase, and can hardly see.

          It simply amazes me that something as important as copying land records could be done by people who wrote so badly.  You'd think good handwriting ('copperplate') would be the basic job qualification, but it wasn't.  Perhaps beggars couldn't be choosers.

 

           Later that night, we are in the midst of the next winter storm.  The weather forecasters have been predicting snow on the Atlantic coast as bad as I experienced in Delaware just before Christmas.  But here it's just very heavy rain, and not even very cold.  I think I will test out my new winter hat, which is in the care of Silver.  But by the time I have walked the few steps across the parking lot, I realise that I will get very wet indeed if I walk.  So Silver has to hover in the background once again, coughing discreetly when required.