In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, official legal documents such as land patents, court proceedings, and probate inventories were recorded in handwritten format. The job of record-keeping represented a prestigious position in the community, since literacy was not common.

Modern-day eyes are quick to recognize the often-unusual writing and spelling in those early documents, as they are very different from contemporary written records.

Handwriting was frequently more elaborate and stylized than is common in our current age, and our seventeenth- and eighteenth-century counterparts did not have standardized dictionaries to guide them. As such, there was no fixed spelling for any word or formal name.

Early record keepers were just as human as the modern individual, however. Few things capture this awareness as well as the "doodles" that these literate early settlers left in the margins of the official record books. The blank edges of pages were often filled with swirling flourishes, geometric patterns, and human and zoomorphic designs.

DelmarvaSettlers.org has chosen several of these images from the early records of Somerset County in Maryland and Accomack and Northampton Counties in Virginia to use on this web site. Handwriting samples and signatures from these same sources also appear throughout the site.