Civil Liberty and Probate Records

Civil Liberty and Boosting of Life Quality

Civil liberty and boosting of life quality took place in the 17th and 18th Century. It involved the use of wills, inventories, and plats between 1660 and 1715. Life in the New World serves as a major information source of the time. Further, probate records qualify as public documents that offer serious details on the property owned at the time of death. During the time of civil liberty, efforts went into defining the ability to hold property and how best to deal with succession issues after death. In Maryland, inventories involved personal properties not including land while, on the other hand, wills included the mention of land (Knutsen 21-28). This was a revolutionary period in which people started documenting their properties and looked forward to taking care of their properties better at death. Before such a move, people lived in the bare land, a situation in which there was no documentation on what individuals owned and how they planned to subdivide the same even as they always aimed at making sure that they achieved fairness. With the introduction of civil liberty, sanity reigned because most people were then able to understand how to handle property and could move it on without any complications.

Gender and Race

Gender and race are major issues that affect liberty. While society remains replete with patriarchal ideas, more so where women and people of color receive less attention in societal issues whereby it stalls their general progress and social status. In my liberty efforts, I know there will be challenges since we target to encrypt fairness, on which for sure, the current society is not yet used to working. In addition, times have changed, and every society wants to empower the abused communities that in this case, are women and people of color. Racism in the modern day is at record lows but there is a likelihood that in the current struggles, they receive increased attention.

Probate Records

Probate records offer information on what people own at their time of death. They exist to make sure that people have a good understanding of life and death, ensuring there is a reasonable division of property and thereby reducing wrangles. These documents are the will and inventory in which the inventory does not mention land while the will does. They mean to make sure that property division proceeds fairly and as per the wishes of the deceased. The reasoning behind these documents is that before death, an individual could have certain wishes on how he or she would like descendants and dependents to handle properties and once the property owner dies, the bequeathed can exercise the wishes that the deceased left behind.

Issues with Historical Records

I encountered some issues while looking at the historical records. One major problem was the fact that I could not trace the history behind the papers hence could not understand their reliability in the current society. At the same time, these documents cannot be located in totality, whereby a researcher can only find patches and try to combine with the history available presently (Knutsen 43-56). These same issues arise when using original documents and tend to cast doubt on the information one has currently, introducing a conflict of interests to the user. In my case, I found it interesting that some papers did not have any historical basis since they were the very first but underwent several revisions after their construction. Henceforth, I appreciate these papers because they show us proof of our traceable histories.

Works Cited

Daily Life in the New World, 1634-1715, msa.maryland.gov/msa/stagser/s1259/121/3916/html/0000.html.

Knutsen, Carl Henrik. “Why Democracies Outgrow Autocracies in the Long Run: Civil Liberties, Information Flows, and Technological Change.”Kyklos 68.3 (2015): 357-384.