Penn-Spence estate ledger reconstruction
Reconstruction of an estate ledger sequence from a damaged binder, working back from the surviving year-ends into the missing intermediate quarters.
The binder had survived two house moves, one minor flood, and a previous attempt to rebind it with the wrong order of quires. Year-end summaries existed for most years between 1818 and 1844. The intermediate quarterly entries had been removed at some earlier point, possibly when the ledger was used as a working reference by an executor, and only some came back in.
I did not try to recreate the missing quarters from imagination. The reconstruction is a working document that shows, for each year, what is present, what is absent, and what can be inferred from neighbouring years without overstating it.
The researcher is now using this reconstruction as the basis for a chapter on quarterly cash movement on smaller estates. The reconstruction itself is unpublished and stays with the researcher.
