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(BASK)

MOGER BASKET A (1565-1911)

Transcribed by Alan Brooke and Brian Lake

The Source (BASK)

MOGER BASKET A is a collection of well over 3500 documents originally deriving from the Principal Registry of the Bishop of Exeter. The original documents were sorted and catalogued (in detail) by Miss Olive Moger in the late 1940s, and are now held at the Devon Heritage Centre, Exeter. The catalogue - not the original documents - was kindly photographed for us by Mr Ken Ozanne. The Information that has been extracted from this catalogue for our source BASK is included by kind permission of Mr Derwent Campbell, great-nephew of Miss Moger, on behalf of Miss Moger's heirs. The catalogue of MOGER BASKET A is a typed document. It sometimes includes an amount of detail about (or even a complete abstract of) the particular item Miss Moger was cataloguing. The documents are catalogued in a single sequence of numbers, 1 to 3810, though some numbers (e.g. 31) contain multiple items. Miss Moger left certain numbers in her sequence unused, probably in the expectation that further items of a particular document type might turn up. Numbers not used include 1144 to 1199. The original documents concern all sorts of church matters, including marriage licences, church seating, advowsons and curacies. However, items 1 - 1143 are "letters and papers re wills and administrations". A few isolated items in the collection, with a higher number than 1143, are also testamentary.

Though a few items in Miss Moger's catalogue are copies of actual wills or administrations, a large percentage of other items included are letters. These letters often requested further information about a will or administration, in the process giving extra details about the testator and his/her family. Another percentage of the documents derive from court cases that arose concerning a will, much like those appearing in our source MOGT. Another sub-collection is of proof-of-probate documents. These merely give the name of the testator and that of the executor, or the intestate and administrator. Since the surviving calendars of the lost Devon wills do not include the names of executors and administrators, we have included items derived from these documents because of they give that tiny piece of additional information they show.

 

DWP's editing process

For our index we have selected out of Miss Moger's catalogue of Basket A only items that concern wills and administrations. Evenso, it was decided to omit some of these testamentary items.

In some of the letters (e.g. nos. 667-673) it is not clear who the testator or intestate was, though quite a number of other names are mentioned. We have not been able to include these in our index, sadly. One large section of Miss Moger's BASKET A (nos. 695-799) has been omitted from our transcription, since it merely lists wills and administrations post 1796. Inland Revenue abstracts or copies of these documents have survived and are already included within our sources IRW, DDR1 and DDR2.

 

Locating the source and acquiring copies

If you find an item from source BASK which is of interest to you, please contact the Devon Heritage Centre giving all the details you find in our index. They should be willing to provide you with a photocopy from Miss Moger's detailed catalogue. Note however that, should you wish to acquire a copy of any original document in Basket A, some are so fragile that they may well have to be photographed rather than photocopied.