Wills

The Beadle and Adams archives contains materials relating to American publisher Erastus F. Beadle (1821–1894) and the dime booklet publishing house in which he was a partner, Beadle and Adams.

The Burd Family Papers concern the business, legal, and personal affairs of the Burd family, prominent lawyers and landowners from Philadelphia from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, as well as the legal and business affairs of other branches of the extended family, including the Shippens and Coxes.

Photocopies of handwritten and typed transcripts of ninety-one 17th and 18th century wills from Cecil County, Maryland. Though the photocopies were made circa 1980, the date span of the original wills ranges from 1675-1720. The collection also includes a 20-page photocopied index that corresponds with many of the names of individuals found on wills.

This volume contains an extensive history of the Martin family of Chester County and Delaware County, Pennsylvania, created by John Hill Martin. Martin created the history during the 1870s-1890s, but included materials from both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Hugh M. Morris (1878-1966) was a Delaware lawyer and served as a federal district judge from 1919-1930. The Morris family papers, spanning the dates 1740-1985 and including legal deeds, account books, personal and busienss correspondence, legal records and photographs, documents the lives and career of Judge Hugh Morris and members of his extended family and network.

This last will and administrative account of Delaware planter, mill owner, and surveyor Thomas Noxon reveals Noxon's trading connections with Jamaica and New York, the extent of his property ownership and business interests, names of people he enslaved, and the expenses paid from his estate by his executors from the time of his death in 1743 until 1753.

Autograph documents produced by lawyer, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and U. S. Senator from Delaware, George Read. One document concerns payments in relation to the will of Ebenezer Howell. The other concerns the sale of Howell's tavern and land in Newark, Delaware, to Henry Darby, and subsequently to John Evans.

The Rush family papers consist of materia spanning the late seventeenth to late nineteenth centuries relating to the prominent Rush family of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

One handwritten will and testament composed and signed by New Castle, Delaware, resident Isaac Tine.

The Frank W. Tober papers comprise letters, postcards, photographs, pamphlets, magazines, newspaper clippings, newsletters, printing ephemera, invoices, notebooks, woodblocks, prints, coins, sculpture, and other realia. A major portion of the papers relate to Tober's collections and collecting activities. Tober was a chemical engineer with a substantial personal interest in the study of rare books, printing, Napoleon and the French Revolution, and, in particular, literary forgery.

The Joseph Brevitt Townsend papers, spanning the dates 1810-1917 (bulk dates 1840-1896), document the professional career, and to a lesser extent the personal life, of the Philadelphia lawyer, Joseph Brevitt Townsend.

The Waples Family Papers, spanning the dates 1753-1864, outline the family’s role in the economic development of Milton in Broadkill Hundred, Delaware. But the bulk of the collection, 1851-1864, focuses on Gideon B. Waples, beginning with the pre-Civil War period when he was a student at Delaware College. After he voluntarily left his studies, he became a farmer and businessman in southern Delaware; he also served as a political aide to two governors of Delaware during the Civil War.