The Family Tree Problem Solver: Tried-And-True Tactics for Tracing Elusive Ancestors (22 page)

6.
What specific records did you expect to search and why? If you own a family Bible that gives contemporary information for all births to a couple, and this information is confirmed by the federal census, why did you need to search the probate records? Learning all you can about your ancestor is important, but if your ancestor's records were victims of a courthouse fire you may not have that luxury. You may have to accept that you will never know as much about this family as you would like to know.

7.
What information did you hope to gain? What did you wish to learn that you don't already know? You may have to focus on exactly what you need to know and where to obtain that piece of information. It may be that the most important thing you need to know is the link that will get your research out of that particular location.

8.
How was the information going to affect your line of descent? This is, after all, the critical factor.

The next step is to envision the worst possible scenario and determine how to deal with it. Let us now assume that the record you desperately need was the victim of two conflagrations of immense proportions, one that occurred thirty years after your family moved to the county and one that happened three days after they left.

We must now narrow our task and focus our search. We must try to find either a
duplicate
, a
substitute
, or a
replacement
for the lost record. And then we must use that document to the greatest extent possible.

A duplicate is a copy of the original record.
A duplicate may exist because the original record was copied when a new boundary or jurisdiction was formed, or because your ancestor moved and wanted to establish a previous legal relationship. A duplicate may have been required by law, such as in the case of probate. A will is usually recorded in every county in which the individual owned land. Often, duplicates of marriage records exist in the home and church as well as in the courthouse. Or there may be a duplicate because your ancestor chose to submit a document as evidence for a completely different purpose, such as a pension or land warrant.

Records can be filed in the strangest of places. I found a will for Jonathan Hopkins in the Revolutionary War pension application of Elijah Curtis of Massachusetts. I haven't the foggiest idea what it was doing there. It is not at all unusual to find Bible records in Revolutionary War pension applications or marriage licenses and death certificates in Civil War pension records. Virgil White's 4,014 indexed pages of Revolutionary War abstracts has opened a number of these misplaced or misfiled records.

Published records (provided they are complete transcripts, such as
Suffolk Deeds, Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, Records of the Massachusetts Bay
, and
Records of the Colony of New Plymouth
) are examples. These records were reproduced in their entirety. Microfilmed records would also fall in this category. It is possible that a courthouse lost records after microfilming was done.

A
substitute
is a document that contains exactly the same or similar information as the one you are searching for, but which is produced for another reason. Examples of substitutes include pension affidavits, newspapers, church records, court cases, land plats, and tax records.

Copies of tax records often were sent to the state auditor, so they may be one of the few types of records to survive a courthouse fire. They can give clues to descent (by following the land transactions), migrations (when people dropped off the rolls or were first assessed), and even ages (there was usually a defined age at which men began to pay taxes, and often an older age when they became exempt).

You can find marriage records or affidavits concerning them in federal pension records. Pulaski County, Missouri, has lost most of its records from before the late nineteenth century, but I was able to find documentation for a marriage that took place there in a pension application. Rachel Jones, widowed during the War of 1812, reported in her application that she had married William McLaughlin in Pulaski County, Missouri, on 21 September 1850, and that he died 21 December of the same year. Reports of marriages are also found in Oregon Donation Land applications. Isaac Cook reported in application #388 that he had married his wife, Sarah, on 8 September 1815, in the burned county of Burke, North Carolina. Unfortunately, he didn't give her maiden name. In addition, divorce records often give the exact date of marriage and the wife's maiden name.

A
replacement
is a record filed to replace a lost one. Examples include affidavits attesting to the lost facts, refiled deeds or wills, and chaining of destroyed titles by land title companies — tracing the titles from the original owner to the current one. For instance, the Hamilton County, Ohio, courthouse burned 28–29 March 1884, during a riot that ensued after a jury returned a verdict of manslaughter for a person city residents believed to be guilty of first-degree murder. Many records went up in flames. The county commission decided to reconstruct marriage records by calling in original documents and copying them at taxpayer expense.

Deeds are the records that are replaced most often because people are anxious to have a clear title to land they own and may some day want to sell. William Turner filed a deed in the burned county of Taney, Missouri, on 21 July 1886, telling how on 27 March 1861,
twenty-five years earlier
, he had purchased the SW ¼ of section 18, township 26, range 16. I was able to solve one genealogical problem using a combination of information from a case file for a federal land entry and rerecorded deeds. The case involved a land entry made in 1836, an attempt to clear title to the land in 1921, and a deed from 1876 that was rerecorded in 1917.

Court actions can occur long after the event. Jeremiah Cheek left a will in Bedford County, Tennessee, in 1823, but it did not survive the courthouse fire there. When the heirs quarreled in 1834, a suit was brought in chancery court. The will was produced and recorded in minutes for the proceeding, which did survive the fire. The will was a detailed one, naming each heir. This example involved a relatively short time between court events, but cases may extend over a long period of time. One such case involved a land claim made in 1768 by Thomas Manning of Moreland, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, that was filed in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, involving a parcel of land near the Sheepscott River in Maine that was bought by John Mason 20 January 1652. Your ancestor also may have been involved in a court case long after he left the county.

Look for the many substitutes that exist for courthouse records.
Listed below are sixteen major genealogical sources that are not located in courthouses:

Following is a review of some common records we would expect to find in a courthouse, and suggestions for identifying a duplicate, substitute, or replacement for the lost document. Remember, what we need is not the record itself, but the information it contains. When a courthouse has burned, obtaining that information becomes more difficult, but it's not impossible. We just need to be absolutely clear about what it is we seek. The list below is not exhaustive, but it offers suggestions as to where you might look and how you might think about your problem. The examples merely scratch the surface of what is available.

If your ancestor owned property in a different state or county from the one in which he died, the land cannot be sold until a copy of the will or administration is recorded in the county where the land was held. I have found several probate proceedings and/or wills from Kentucky in the land records of Greene County, Missouri. Brent Holcomb, a professional researcher, found several wills from the burned county of Hanover, Virginia, in South Carolina records. Therefore, you might try to locate land records of the county where your ancestor came from in the records of the area where he might have planned to settle later, to see if his probate record was recorded or duplicated there. If the person you seek was a man of means or married a woman whose family may have left her land in a different county, search the surrounding counties. This is particularly true if your ancestor lived on the frontier and a new area opened up near his place of residence. He may have purchased land there very cheaply with no intention of living there, but with the hope of making money from it. A will was often copied into a deed book in the area into which the settler moved, or sent back to the original county where he may have still owned land. Two such wills found in Miller County, Missouri, are Philmon French's will of 1859, stating that he was of Onondaga, New York, and the 1869 will of Andrew Estes. The latter was recorded in Crawford County, Arkansas, but a courthouse fire in 1877 destroyed all probate records there.

You may be able to find a substitute or replacement for your ancestor's will by finding the will of a relative who lived in a different area. Records of the estates of single persons or those who died without children are especially good at naming large numbers of relatives. Burditt Sams died at age seventy-five in St. Clair County, Missouri, in 1846, leaving no children. The courthouse in St. Clair was burned during the Civil War, destroying probate and marriage records. The circuit court minute book survived. In that minute book is the division of Burditt's estate among his twenty-one heirs — most of whom did not live in St. Clair County, and some not even in the state of Missouri. Joseph G.E. Baynham's will is recorded in St. Clair County Deed Book C:92 and refers to another will that was still in force in Halifax County, Virginia.

Another substitute for an intestate proceeding is a land partition among the heirs. These partitions and other circuit court proceedings often were published in the legal notice section of local newspapers. For instance, on 5 June 1858, the
Springfield Mirror
contained a notice from the adjoining county of Webster, Missouri:

This legal notice names eleven children, three spouses, and the name of the remarried widow. Although one cannot find legal notices for every probate that may have been lost to fire, you would be surprised at the number that were published naming at least the administrator and securities, and sometimes heirs as well.

Newspaper legal notices may not include all the probate information that you would like, but they do provide the date that letters of administration or testamentary were issued.
Experience indicates that these were first issued within fourteen days of the decedent's death. This at least tells you that the man died in that county and didn't move away. From legal notices that appeared in the newspapers of Greene County, Missouri, I was able to document over seventy-five deaths that occurred in surrounding counties between 1844 and 1850, even though the original probate records had burned. It's worth the effort to locate any surviving newspapers in an area where other records were destroyed. The best source for eighteenth-century newspapers is the website for the Library of Congress:
⟨
www.loc.gov/rr/news/18th
. Printed sources include Clarence Brigham's
History and Bibliography of American Newspapers 1690–1920
, Winifred Gregory's
American Newspapers 1921–1936, Newspapers in Microform 1848–1983
, and the United States Newspaper Program Union List from 1690 to the present.

Probate proceedings may be appealed to an appellate or supreme court, where they are often published. The decennial digest indexes for each state publish appeals to state and federal courts; these are located in law libraries, state libraries, and some university libraries. Completed federal court case files (1790–1930) are usually deposited in the regional federal archives and records centers. Following is one from my own family.

When you are looking for a substitute or replacement for a marriage record, the best places to look are within home sources such as letters, diaries, and Bibles. Most of us consider marriage to be one of the most important events of a lifetime, so these records frequently remain in the family. When reporting events to relatives far away, marriages are among the first communicated. The following letter was dated 3 February 1869 from Monmouth, Illinois: “Kate Wallace and her new husband are here also. Perhaps you don't know who her new husband is. Well, it's Joe Brown, half-brother to Aunt Liz and they were married Christmas Eve.” I have searched Warren County (where Monmouth is located) and three adjoining counties for that marriage record, but have not found it. This is the only source I have.