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What's at the County Courthouse?
Pamela Boyer Sayre, CG, CGL
If you have done your census research and located a family in a particular area
at a given time, you should next explore the local records available for that family.
Records available at the local level may vary from county to county, and certainly
from state to state. However, the same types of records were created in every locale.
Just think of the times in your life that you have gone to the town hall or county
courthouse. You may have obtained a marriage license, perhaps received a divorce decree,
or filed paperwork for adoption or guardianship of a minor child. As administrator of
a relative's will, you may have filed settlement papers for his or her estate.
If you have bought or sold land or real property, you or your representative recorded
these transactions and your deed at the county courthouse. Perhaps you've been
involved in a minor civil lawsuit. The records of this exist at the county courthouse.
And surely, as a good citizen, you've registered to vote? These records may be on
file at the town hall or county courthouse. Get the picture? Your ancestors left
behind valuable genealogical information at their county courthouses, too.
Local records include the usual birth, marriage, death, and probate records.
But you'll also find receipts for wolf scalps, commitments of the insane, care
of the poor and orphaned, loyalty oaths from the Civil War era, military discharges,
licenses, records of stray animals, naturalizations, school censuses, tax records,
and a host of other revealing documents. If you aren't digging through those records,
you're missing some revealing details about your people!
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