The Family Tree Problem Solver: Tried-And-True Tactics for Tracing Elusive Ancestors (21 page)

TITHE:
The tenth part of one's income contributed for charitable or religious purposes. Broadly interpreted, any tax or assessment of one tenth. Titheable may be synonymous with taxable. A tithing man was the constable. In colonial Virginia, the tithe was imposed on the personal property of males of productive age, as established by legislative act — variously sixteen to twenty-one years of age.

• Black, Henry Campbell, M.A.
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  . 5th edition. (St. Paul, Minn.:West Publishing Company, 1979.)
  

• Glazier, Michael.
  The Sessions Laws of American States and Territories Prior to 1900
  . 18 vols. Available on microfiche from Redgrave Information Resources Corporation, 53 Wilton Road, Westport, CT 06880. Also available in print in many law libraries.
  

• Keen, R. Martin. “Community and Material Culture Among Lancaster Mennonites: Hans Hess from 1717–1733.”
  Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage
  XIII (January 1990): 2–25.
  

• Keim, C. Ray. “Primogeniture and Entail in Colonial Virginia.”
  William and Mary Quarterly
  3d series 25 (1968): 545–586.
  

• Keyssar, Alexander. “Widowhood in Eighteenth Century Massachusetts: A Problem in the History of the Family.”
  Perspectives in American History
  . 8 (1974): 83–119.
  

• Klein, Fannie J.
  Federal and State Court Systems: A Guide
  . (Cambridge: Ballinger Publishers, 1977.)
  

• Salmon, Marylynn.
  Women and the Law of Property in Early America
  . (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.)
  

• Salmon, Marylynn. “Women and Property in South Carolina: The Evidence From Marriage Settlements, 1730–1830,”
  William and Mary Quarterly
  3d series 39 (1982): 655–659.
  

T
he problem of the burned courthouse is a critical one. One minute there stands a beautiful edifice undoubtedly crammed with your ancestor's records. The next moment is disaster. Solutions to the calamity of the burned courthouse are neither easy nor quick. On the other hand, the Chinese word for crisis is synonymous with opportunity, and in every crisis there is an opportunity for further growth and progress. When courthouse records are gone, one is forced to discover new records, sources, and methods. Learning these alternative strategies may be the only way to find the answers you need.

This chapter is divided into two parts. The first part will deal with the basic problem of the burned courthouse: how to find out what you should know about the county's history and records, and specific questions you should ask about your own research to narrow the field of records you need. The second half will discuss some of the records you can use that will help provide the information you need to make up for the loss at the courthouse.

To make progress despite this research problem, you will need creativity, perseverance, and a willingness to dig into the available records. Some of the records discussed here probably are not available in your public library or online. Most will not be indexed and many will not be conveniently labeled “genealogy.”

However, if you enjoy the challenge of the search, think that searching is almost as rewarding as finding, and have the time and interest to search nonindexed and unusual records, you may solve a lineage problem others have refused to touch or considered unsolvable.

This pursuit will take work and a study of new sources. In listing these, I offer not only suggestions, but hope. In fact, I will make you a bet. I wager that you cannot find a county in which all the records were destroyed. Not just court records — but all the records. Some records, somewhere, still exist for that county. Finding them is up to you.

The first step in any crisis is not to overreact. Never make a problem bigger than it truly is. The second step is to divide the problem into parts.
When you face only one aspect of the problem at a time, the task will seem less formidable and more manageable.
Thus, when your research moves into a county that is “burned,” you must begin by determining the extent and magnitude of the loss. It is possible that you were simply misinformed and there was no fire at all. Or perhaps you obtained your information from a county court clerk who said, “I am sorry we cannot help you. We have had a courthouse fire.” You imagine thousands of records in a small ash heap. In reality, however, the fire occurred last Wednesday afternoon when someone threw a cigarette into a trashcan, and it burned for no more than sixty seconds. Therefore, your first question should be “Was there really a courthouse fire?” Next, if you find that a significant fire did occur, you need to determine when it happened and what it destroyed.

In some cases, only some of the documents may have been damaged. For instance, the Albany, New York, fire of 1911 burned thousands of records, but many have been salvaged. The best discussion of this disaster is in “The 1911 State Library Fire and Its Effect On New York Genealogy” by Harry Macy Jr., FASG, published in the
NYG&B Newsletter
in the Spring of 1999. We must remember that because many old documents are not readily available on the shelves, the current staff may not know or even care about where such records are stored. The vast majority of transactions conducted by county clerks concern contemporary documents, and they have neither the time nor interest to deal with older records. However, they may be able to recommend someone else who would be familiar with their holdings, such as a local researcher or historical society. Almost every community has an expert on its records, even though the position may not be an official one.

The next phase of your initial research is to study everything you can find on the county. This means county histories, Works Progress Administration inventories, and published and unpublished research guides. Look especially for well-documented county histories. A good place to start your search is P. William Filby's
Bibliography of American County Histories
(Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1983). This is a comprehensive list of five thousand county histories. Use these local histories not only for the information contained in the text, but also in the footnotes, which will tell you the sources the author used. Genealogists traditionally neglect to examine footnotes, but they are a rich source of material to broaden your research. Other good sources can be found by doing a Web search for the county itself. Often, county websites will list bibliographies, source material, and inventories.

My research centering on the Yocum family led me to one of the worst burned counties I have encountered, Taney County, Missouri. Taney County has experienced at least three fires and has no early newspapers or church records. I call it the graveyard of Missouri genealogy. While reading any articles I could find on the area, I came across one about an Indian trader, “William Gillis and the Delaware Migration,” by Lynn Morrow, published in the
Missouri Historical Review
. Why would I read something that had neither Taney County or the Yocum family mentioned in the title? Because you must read
everything
you can find on the area that has been burned. I learned that John Campbell, who was the Indian agent, ordered two principal lawbreakers, a Mr. Denton and Solomon Yocum, off Delaware land in July 1825. Yocum had settled within the Delaware line and erected a distillery. He was making peach brandy and selling it to the Indians. This was in the area of my interest and twelve years before Taney County was formed. Where did the author
find
this information? The footnote referred to a letter written by John Campbell to Richard Graham. The source for the letter was the manuscript collection of Richard Graham at the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis. This has led me to a marvelous source for information on the early white settlers of Taney County and new sources, such as Indian depredations, for further study.
Always
read the footnotes.

Ask yourself, “To what extent does this loss of records affect my personal research?” When you learn that certain records you intended to search are not available, you must consider your needs more carefully so you can narrow your search. Answering the following eight questions will help you determine your next step.

1.
During what time period did your family live in that county? Narrow your range as much as possible. Did another part of the family leave at a different time than your particular branch? Could that branch have left records in another county that might relate to your family?

2.
Have there been any county boundary changes that could affect your search? Surely you have discovered ancestors whose place of legal residence changed although they never moved an inch. Genealogical research often involves areas with disputed land claims, state and county boundary changes, or the formation of states from territories. The records you need might exist in the original county and not be affected by a fire in the other one, or vice versa. For example, what is now Kentucky was once Fincastle County, Virginia. The surviving records of Fincastle County are kept with the records of Montgomery County, Virginia.

John D. Shannon was another resident of Taney County, Missouri, whose records burned. I wanted to discover where he had lived before his move to Missouri, so I began by looking for connections with other individuals in the vicinity. A man named Finis W. Shannon died before Taney County was formed from the parent county of Greene. This was early in the region's history, when there were few people in the area, so perhaps these two men were related. Finis's probate file was remarkable. It not only showed that he was a brother of John D. Shannon, but gave the origin of the brothers as Williamson County, Tennessee. In addition, it contained records of both their father (for whom Finis had been executor in Tennessee) and their grandfather in North Carolina!

3. Are you sure the record you need was in the building that burned?
Some counties may have stored their tax records in a bank vault in 1877, even though they keep them in the courthouse now. Many records once kept in a courthouse may have been turned over to private hands when storage became a problem, and thus would have escaped a courthouse fire. The records of Vernon County, Missouri, have had quite a history. The courthouse there was burned in 1863 during the Civil War. When a Civil War widow attempted to obtain a pension record after the war, she was told the marriage records were not available. But from the county history we learn:

4.
Which court had authority over the matter in which you are interested? Be sure you understand the legal jurisdiction for the time period and records you are searching. For instance, many divorce records you would expect to be in the courthouse may be found in legislative journals during the early, formative period of a state.

Prior to 1774, probate records for Suffield, Connecticut, were within the jurisdiction of Hampshire County, Massachusetts. In South Carolina, the equity courts had different jurisdictions than the counties. Therefore, it's possible that the courthouse records completely burned while the equity cases survived. That is exactly the case for Lexington District, South Carolina; indeed, the equity is all that survived for that county. Tax records for many burned counties in Kentucky are held at the state level and have been microfilmed. Remember, records are not always where you would expect them to be. Moreover, you may be able to locate copies of burned documents that were stored elsewhere.

5.
Did your family live near a county boundary? Be sure to search adjacent counties just in case the record you need was never touched by the fire. People often took out marriage licenses in the most convenient courthouse, not necessarily in the one of legal residence. If you are researching an early period when boundaries were not well defined, people may have thought they lived in one county when they actually lived in another. One of my ancestor's lands is now quite clearly in Laurens County, South Carolina, but he believed it to be in Newberry, so he recorded deeds there — as did several subsequent individuals.

Figure 6-1
Map of Southwest Missouri — William Montgomery and daughter.

In 1833, William Montgomery lived in the sparsely settled region of Southwest Missouri shown in the area marked (1) in Figure 6-1. His sixteen-year-old daughter wanted to marry a boy she had met while they had been living on the Gasconade River (2). The justice of the peace in Gasconade County would not marry them there, since the father of the bride was not present and she was underage. The family then sent for the justice of the peace who was the closest in Benton County (3), but he would not marry them either since they were not in his geographical jurisdiction. So the couple and relatives traveled over the county line to his area, called “Pippin Hollow,” where the wedding took place. At the time, the hollow was located in Benton County, which became Hickory County in 1848 (4). The marriage, however, occurred before either Hickory or Polk County was formed. Thus, that marriage was recorded in Springfield, the county seat of the parent county of Greene (5). Records are not always where you expect them to be!