Ian Watson of Burtenbach, Germany, has been awarded the first ASG Continuing Research Project Grant of $2500 for his work to bring transcriptions of Ipswich Deeds to public researchers.

Ipswich Deeds are the five volumes of land records kept at the northern Essex County registry from roughly 1640 to 1710. In their early years these volumes also contain registered wills, inventories, and court records. They are an important source on the early settlers of Ipswich, Newbury, Rowley, and nearby towns. The originals are at the Southern Essex Registry of Deeds in Salem, along with manuscript copies of volumes 1-3 which were made in the 1800s. FamilySearch has digitized microfilm of the manuscript copies of volumes 1-3 and the originals of volumes 4-5 (https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/74273). Building on the work of ASG Fellows George Freeman Sanborn Jr. and Jane Fletcher Fiske, who transcribed and initially indexed the first two volumes of Ipswich Deeds, Watson is updating the archaic media on which the transcriptions have been stored, converting from an obsolete text program to modern LaTeX files, and formatting and re-indexing the results for publication.

Ian Watson is author of the forthcoming Volume I of Great Migration: Immigrants to New England, 1636-1638, covering surnames beginning with A through Be. He is co-author with Kyle Hurst of Selected Ancestors of Nelson McMahon and Louise Rathbun published by Newbury Street Press in 2020, and he is a paid proofreader for the Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly and the APG eNews. He preserved and reposted the Pruzhany Uyezd Research Society’s website at www.pruzh.org, which preserves material about the Pruzhany district Jewish diaspora. Watson’s most recent genealogical article is “The Dating of the Providence Civil Compact,” published in The American Genealogist, 91(2019-2020):165-189, 261-283.

For more information about the Grant Program and application forms, e-mail acwcrane@aol.com or write to Alicia Crane Williams, FASG, Chair, ASG Grant Committee, 4 White Trellis, Plymouth MA 02360