Reading through estate accountings can be boring at times. However, one never knows when a comment about a bill or account balance will be genealogically significant. One 1880 era estate settlement contained a reference to a doctor bill for "attendance at birth of child."
There was no name or gender listed, but at least it confirmed the birth.
Estate receipts for an ancestor who passed in 1804 have proven invaluable in our research. They proved he outlived his only child, named the doctor in attendance, connected the Ohio relative with Kentucky lands and even talked about the sale of a slave woman, illegal in Ohio at the time. Many of the signers of the receipts were neighbors and friends among whose papers were references to our ancestor, how long they had know each other and where. That was a great find in the time prior to census records.
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