Clayton Cramer's book reviewed

There is a newly released on-line data base to the public called Virginia and Maryland Probate Inventories, 1740-1810. It is co-sponsored by George Mason University and Gunston Hall. Of course, George Mason’s inventory is not listed, but his wife and sons are as well as George Washington. http://chnm.gmu.edu/probateinventory/ Go Figure!

Many court records were stolen or destroyed during the Civil War, but what they have on-line is searchable. It is important to know the terminology from the 18th century and that these inventories were usually written sequentially where they found the items. For example, a search on musket only yields 15 separate probates. A search for Fowling (short for fowling piece) however returns 28 hits. Interestingly a search on pistol yields 65 separate probate hits. Don’t forget those evil Blunderbusses – 5 of them.

Here is a sampling of some famous people and their firearms. Lord Thomas Fairfax 1782 – a Loyalist. 4 guns, 1 Blunderbuss, 13 old firelocks, 1 brace of broken pistols, 19 pounds of gunpowder. He obviously had an arsenal.

George Washington: 1 pair of steel pistols, 3 pair of pistols. Another man with an arsenal. A lot of people gave firearms to General Washington as presents, but his probate is lacking giving rise to the question what happened to all the guns?

George Mason, Jr. George was a member of The Fairfax Independent Company of Volunteers founded by his father and was an ensign in that company. Later he became a Minuteman. He died young of a rheumatic disease only out living his father by 4 years. Here is his probate listed in sequential order of the person writing them down: 4 pounds of gunpowder, 1 muskett, 1 fowling piece, 1 rifle, 1 old rifle, 1 fowling piece, 2 small guns. Another man with an arsenal. He must have been a wack job ready to go off at any minute on a killing spree.

Rudy, What happened to the historical estate inventories then, is the same as what happens now - inventories are incomplete, inaccurate and many are missing from the records altogether. For example, I inherited my father and father-in-laws guns, and none of them made it into an inventory for their estates, even as picky as we are today. There is no way to get a scientifically accurate sample out of these records, as much as we might like to. History is an art, not a science, and as much mathematics as we throw at it, it will never be a science.

If Bellesiles had bothered to think it through carefully, he never would have started writing about probate records. The numbers shown in the records can never demonstrate the absence of firearms, only their presence. An inventory that lists no firearms might be for an estate that had no firearms or for one that had dozens that were unlisted. In contrast, one that listed a dozen might have one dozen or one hundred, but certainly not none.