Family-histories and genealogies : containing a series of ...

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affidavit given in the case, and now preserved in the New London
Probate Office, to certain evidences of property in England which were
withheld from Matthew Griswold, as follows :
" Affid. before W"" Ely, Justice of Peace, November 15, 1699, by Henry Meriom
—that Brunson told him he had a trunk of writings that were his father-in-law's,
which he said that it would vex his brother Mathew Griswold very much. I told
him that I heard so .
. . and
I told him that I believed that there was some
weighty concerns in those papers, for money either in this country or in England ;
he answered that there were some great concerns in them, and that there were some
papers there that said Griswold never knew of, and never should. . . ."
This concealment of titles to property was complained of to the
General Court by Matthew Griswold, in 1700, "that all those deeds and
writings which doe concern all or any of the lands that did belong to his
father Mr. Mathew Griswold in his life -time, both in old England and
new, are withheld, so that they cannot be entred upon the publick records.
. . ."" Had these papers been recorded, they would, in all probability,
have thrown some light upon the English ancestry of the Griswolds.
Of course "those papers" involving "great concerns" were the
missing " deeds and writings," which the second Matthew Griswold sued
to recover. Nor can it be doubted that these papers referred to property
in England, because there could have been no difficulty in the son's estab-
lishing his father's rights to any real estate in this country of which he had
had possession. But the case was different in respect to English landed
property. With our system of public records of deeds, then and now,
the loss of title-deeds would not be a serious bar to the recovery of
property. But in England there were no public land-records, so that
Matthew Griswold's loss of deeds was fatal to his claims in that country.
Without the papers the son could not even locate and describe the landed
property of his father in England. Consequently, the property was irre-
trievably lost, and with it all the family-history connected with its trans-
mission.
" The Public Records of the Col. of Conn., 1689-1706, ut supra, p. 338.
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