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Does anyone know about Victorian wills, please? Specifically the 500 years thing. I’m trying to understand a will written in 1874 - the legator has a son (Robert Halstead Hargreaves) but appears to be leaving everything to his own brother Samuel and another trustee for 500 years! I assume this is a legal wheeze to avoid tax or something? Thanks! (The son continued to live on the estate as usual.)

"I give and devise all my freehold and copyhold estates whatsoever and wheresoever (except Estates vested in me upon any trust or by way of mortgage) unto the said Samuel Hargreaves and Thomas Salt their heirs and assigns to the use of the said Samuel Hargreaves and Thomas Salt their executors administrators and assigns for the term of 500 years and after the expiration thereof and in the meantime subject thereto and to the trusts thereof to the use of my said son Robert Halstead Hargreaves his heirs and assigns for ever"

This may be the wrong place but it seemed the likeliest: I'm wanting someone who knows about old inscriptions. A datestone on a local house (Staffordshire) shows “M (new line) I . M (new line) 1763”. No shortage of space to force a new line and double first names were unusual in those days judging from the baptism register. What could the top-line M be apart from a name? Also, was I ever used for J?
Thanks!

This is a technical question - hoping an Apple Mac and BNA user out there can advise me. I have a sub to the British Newspaper Archive and it used to work normally. I didn't use it for a bit, and when I came back to it recently, I found that its newspaper pages take 2.5 minutes to load, on all my browsers - Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera.

I have a Macbook Air 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard); am on the latest compatible version of all browsers. Have emptied all caches.

BNA's Support Team can find no explanation and say no one else has reported a problem. Other newspaper sites, e.g. Trove, load normally. It's not a memory problem; there's a lot more memory available than when the site was working normally.

I had installed Ghostery on a couple of browsers since I last used the site, so I tried removing that - made no difference.

I'm not happy to have paid £80 for something that's so cumbersome to use. Can anyone help please? Does anyone know what BNA use to load their pages? Have they changed it?

Don't know if anyone could help me with this. My great-grandfather, John Potter, born Feering, Essex 1837, enlisted 49th Regiment of Foot, Chelmsford, 27.12.1854 as a servant of No. 3893. Served in Malta, Crimea and West Indies. 27th December 1864 completed 10 years’ service and discharged Dublin. Married Emily Jane Luckin at St George Hanover Square, March 1866. Became a steward at Royal Thomas Yacht Club.

The family story is that he died 6.8.1886 of food poisoning on a staff outing of the Royal Thames Yacht Club. The club paid for my grandfather aged 11 and a younger brother to go into the District Orphan Working School in Camden Town. My grandfather left a photo with his father's dates written at the bottom.

I can't find any death record for John Potter (have wasted a lot of money ordering wrong death certificates) and have no idea where the staff outing might have been to, if it was a yacht club - overseas?? I asked the Royal Thames Yacht Club but they said they had no record of it. Any ideas welcomed!