“Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had imagined.”
~WILLIAM JAMES
“No, all records did not burn! Not anywhere!”
~ELIZABETH SHOWN MILLS, CG, CGL, FASG
The 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 three 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 part 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, while the third will share real-life case studies.
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, know 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 consider unsolvable.
This pursuit will take work and careful 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 could have occurred last Wednesday afternoon when someone threw a cigarette into a trash can, 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 documents may have been damaged. For instance, the Albany, New York, fire of 1911 burned thousands of records, but many have been salvaged. 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 an Internet 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 nor 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.
Indian depredations were claims made to the government by whites whose property had been destroyed by the Indians, and vice versa.
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.
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?
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’ 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!
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:
The courthouse records had a remarkable experience. Col. Hunter took them to Springfield. When General Price fell back into Arkansas they were taken along and stored for a time at Bentonville, then, as the Federals advanced along, they were moved hither and thither. On one occasion they were deposited in an empty building and in the hurry of leaving, would have been abandoned but for Major Prewitt, who placed them in his wagon and hauled them away. At last the confederates abandoned them for good and they fell into the hands of a federal regiment—a Kansas Regiment. So intense was the hatred for the people of Vernon County for Kansans, and so bitter the prejudice against them, that few would have believed any report other than they were burned. On the contrary, they took the greatest care of them. The records books were placed in one strong box, the papers in another and each box guarded carefully. From far down in Arkansas, the records were brought by gradual journey from post to post until at last they reached Fort Scott, Kansas, where they were kept until the close of the war and the reconstruction of the county. They were then restored to the county authorities at Nevada, with only one book, Deed Book B, and a few unimportant papers missing.
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.
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.
In 1833, William Montgomery lived in the sparsely settled region of Southwest Missouri shown in the area marked (1) in image A. 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!
William Montgomery and his daughter lived in Southwest Missouri, depicted here. The large numbered stars indicate locations important when the (underage) daughter married across county boundaries. The marriage record wasn’t located where you might expect.
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.
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.
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.
Look for the many substitutes that exist for courthouse records. Listed below are sixteen major genealogical sources that are not located in courthouses:
In the sections that follow, we’ll review the different kinds of alternative documents that can stand in for destroyed records, plus some common records we would expect to find in a courthouse. In addition, we’ll provide 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 that follows 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.
We must now narrow our task and focus our search. We must try to find 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 have 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 1⁄4 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.
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 who 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 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:
Phebe Hyden, Simon Lakey, John Pock and Ruth Pock, his wife, Jackson Hodges and Anna Hodges, his wife vs. Jacob Lakey, Levi Davis and Rebecca Davis his wife, John Lakey, Andrew Lakey, Lewis Lakey, Sissial Lakey, Phebe Lakey & Lidia Lakey. Petition to assign the dower of Phebe Hyden and to divide the real estate among the above named plaintiffs and defendants, heirs of Jacob Lakey, deceased.
This legal notice names eleven children, three spouses, and 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 sources for eighteenth-century newspapers are Newspapers.com <www.newspapers.com>, GenealogyBank <www.genealogybank.com>, and the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America program <chroniclingamerica.loc.gov>. 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:
Cases in the supreme court of the state of Vermont: Moses Robinson, Aaron Robinson, Samuel Robinson, Elijah Robinson, and Fay Robinson, John S. Robinson, only son and heir of Nathan Robinson, deceased, heirs of Moses Robinson, late of Bennington deceased, appellants from a decree of the judge of probate for a distribution of the estate of said deceased.
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.
One of my luckiest encounters while searching for family sources in unusual places involves a Bible record for a Kansas family that had been submitted to the Kansas State Historical Society. A loose sheet of paper that did not appear to pertain to the family inexplicably had been stuck within that record. It said: “Francis Berry and Esther Day were married 29 January 1812 by Tidence Lane, J.P. in East Tennessee.” The archivists at the Kansas Historical Society sent it to the Tennessee Genealogical Society, which published it in An’Searchin in the July–September 1972 issue. It was relatively simple for me to locate the residence of Tidence Lane. Although Hawkins County, Tennessee, is not a burned county, the marriage for Berry and Day was not recorded there. Genealogical journals often publish unusual and obscure family material. If you consult the Periodical Source Index (PERSI), something about your own family may surface.
In the January 1983 issue of The Virginia Genealogist, Elizabeth Shown Mills, CG, CGL, FASG, who often lectures on the subject of burned counties, described finding marriage information hidden within a survey book from the badly burned county of Buckingham County, Virginia. The entry read, “Capt. Thomas Anderson, deceased ... willed to his late wife, now Mrs. Birks.”
Another substitute for a marriage record is a divorce record. Although later ones are filed in the courthouse, divorces that occurred early in a state’s history were recorded in published journals of the statehouse or senate. You wouldn’t bother getting a divorce if you were never married, so if there was a divorce, ipso facto there was a marriage. In fact, the marriage date and place often are part of the divorce record. It’s also possible that, even if the divorce was never completed, a petition may have survived. Petitions far outnumber divorces granted. A divorce also may have been appealed to a superior or supreme court.
In Dade County, Missouri, marriage records were not kept before 1863, even though the county was formed in 1841. The petition of Jacob Lakey vs. Nancy Lakey appeared in a newspaper published in adjoining Greene County, but was also submitted to the Missouri legislature. The record there gave her maiden name as Cox and reported that she was then a resident of Hardeman County, Tennessee.
Newspaper divorce petitions may also be helpful. On 7 January 1845, the Springfield Advertiser posted the following notice: “Stephen D. Sutton vs. Susannah Sutton. Married in 1831 in Jackson, County, Alabama. Defendant deserted plaintiff in 1833 and is a nonresident of the State of Missouri.” Divorces were more common than you might believe, and they could be heard in various courts. Read the chapter on “Divorce and Separation” in Marylynn Salmon’s book, Women and the Law of Property in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986) and Glenda Riley’s Divorce American Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) for more information on this American tradition.
In addition to legal notices reporting petitions for divorces, newspapers also printed warnings to the public, such as this one published in January 1857: “Warning not to trade with my wife Nancy Ann Critcher. Signed C.D. Critcher of Wright County [Missouri].” Wright County is a partially burned county. The surname Critcher does not appear in either the 1850 or the 1860 census there. This type of notice, indicating probable separation even when a divorce did not occur, appeared in even the earliest newspapers. They at least state the given name of the wife and a date by which the marriage must have occurred. The Vermont Gazette began publishing in June 1783; by November of that year, Samuel Herrick of Bennington was complaining about his wife, Lydia, leaving his bed and board.
Churches also provide substitutes for county marriage records. Although church records can be hard to locate, they are often still available at the local level. Check local libraries, historical societies, and archives, then move to state and national repositories. Examine church newspapers, as well as the records of church historical societies and church-supported colleges and universities. Church records frequently are turned over to such institutions and may be stored in unexpected places. For instance, the Baptist church records for Middletown, Orange County, New York, are housed at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. The National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) may help you locate church records.
The documents citizens most often attempt to save from fire, flood, and other destructive events are land records. These are also the records most likely to be rerecorded after the disaster. When looking for replacement documents, don’t neglect deed books that may have been created long after the originals were destroyed. It is not uncommon for a father to make a deed of gift to his daughter at her marriage. If the family was a slave-holding one, the gift may have been a slave rather than real property. As any real property would automatically go to the husband, sometimes the bride’s father would sell her share to his new son-in-law for an unusually low sum of money. If the father was concerned about his son-in-law’s profligate ways, he may have made his daughter a deed of gift to be held in trust and not subject to her husband’s controls. The following deed illustrates that situation:
On July 9, 1836, Benjamin Porter of Robertson County, Tennessee, for love and affection for daughter Mary Thompson, wife of Thomas G. Thompson, now resident of Cooper County, Missouri, gave to her and the legal heirs of her body a negro woman slave Philes, about 18 years of age, and her boy child, Henry, aged about 7 months. These slaves are not to be subject in any way to pay her husband’s debts (Cooper County, Missouri, Deed Book E:117).
This marriage is recorded neither in Missouri nor Tennessee.
In the genealogy The Sims Brown Family (of South Carolina), James Alvan Brown writes, “Richard S. Brown m. (2) Elizabeth Parham. Richard d. 16 March 1841. Nothing is further known about Elizabeth Parham Brown. A supposition is that she remarried and moved west.” South Carolina did not begin to record marriages until 1911, but a deed dated 24 May 1852 recorded in Newberry County, South Carolina, Deed Book EE:117-118, states that: “Eliza Tranum of Macon County, Alabama, sold land which had belonged to the estate of her husband R.S. Brown, deceased, and that she had since intermarried with Joseph Tranum, who has also died.” Thus we have record of the residence of Richard Brown’s widow and her subsequent marriage.
A deed may also contain a record of a marriage contract. One such contract was recorded 16 October 1812, in Newberry Deed Book N:209 between Charles Thompson of Newberry District, South Carolina, and Nancy Gray, widow, of Abbeville District, South Carolina, stipulating certain financial conditions.
Other local records can provide marriage information. Always check cemetery records and tombstones, where you can find “wife of” and sometimes “daughter of.” Likewise, state censuses can provide you with unexpected information. Marriage records can be difficult to locate in New York, for example, but the New York state censuses of 1865 and 1875 give the dates of marriage for a couple from the preceding year.
If county land records have been destroyed, don’t neglect the federal land entries for those states defined as “federal land states” rather than “state land states.” All of the land records I have obtained for Pulaski and Taney counties in Missouri have come from federal records. Yet, I know exactly what parcel each early settler owned. Microfilmed copies of all federal land states (except Missouri and Alaska) are available at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. Once you have an approximate land description for the parcel of your interest, the tract books will provide you with the number of the case entry file, which may include additional information. Also see Patricia Law Hatcher’s Locating Your Roots: Discover Your Ancestors Using Land Records (Cincinnati: Betterway Books, 2003), pages 79–95. Although some counties have lost all public records to fire, in most cases, at least a few remain. It is important to examine all extant records to glean any available clue.
As you’ll see in the real-life case studies that follow, a burned courthouse offers a great opportunity to explore heretofore unknown genealogical regions. Creativity, persistence, and endless optimism are the keys to this type of research. I cannot guarantee you success, but I can guarantee that you will learn more about genealogical sources in this pursuit than you ever dreamed existed.
I was working on a Butler family from Missouri whom I traced to Overton County, Tennessee—a partially burned county. Neither marriage nor probate records from before the 1860s still exist. Some circuit court minutes, however, have survived. Filled with foreclosures, debt notices, and jury lists, these may also contain items of more interest to a genealogist. The minutes of the October 1843 term of the Overton County circuit court gave me the name of Thomas Butler’s wife as well as those of her brothers and sisters, her father’s name and when he died, and the death date for his widow, possibly Jane Butler’s mother. There was only one way I could have found this information: by reading every page of the minutes that survived.
It is important when working in a burned county that you consider your ancestors’ neighbors and try to rebuild their community. What were their naming patterns, migrations, birth patterns, church affiliations? By studying the community as a whole, you may be able to locate information about neighbors that provides clues to finding similar information for your own family. All serious genealogists know that you cannot study your family as though they lived on an island. Examining records for the entire community is even more crucial when you are working in a burned county.
Isaac Clark settled in the burned county of Pulaski, Missouri, but he also purchased federal land in Miller County, though he did not live there. The only Pulaski County records that have survived are two probate books: wills and administrator’s bonds.
Isaac Clark did not leave a will, but he was living in Pulaski County in 1840, and the configuration of his family on the 1840 census gave me an approximate date for his marriage. His household consisted of one male age five to ten, one male age ten to fifteen, one male age thirty to forty, two females under age five, one female age five to ten, one female age ten to fifteen, and one female age thirty to forty. Assuming that those listed include Isaac himself, his wife, and their children, the eldest children were born between 1825 and 1830, thus placing a marriage about 1824 or 1825, and Isaac’s birth year probably between 1800 and 1802, because in his culture, males usually married at about the age of twenty-one. He did not survive to the 1850 census.
I checked Miller County for the sale of his land there. As Missouri required a dower release on land sales, I hoped to find the given name for Isaac’s wife. In 1838, Isaac and his wife, Mary, sold to Peter Miller their forty-acre federal land entry in Miller County for $150. The witnesses were Miller Wilson and John Wilson. But no marriage for Isaac Clark and Mary [—?—] was found in Missouri records.
I turned to the two surviving probate books in Pulaski County. I knew there was no estate for Isaac Clark, but I wanted to check for estates in which he might have been involved. Isaac Clark was the executor for the will of Cary Boyd of Crawford County in 1832 (Crawford was the parent county of Pulaski). Lydia Boyd was the widow and received all of the estate. A nephew, Francis Boyd, was mentioned. John Laughlin and William Clark were securities for the estate on 20 August 1833 in Pulaski County. As two men named Clark were involved in Cary’s estate and no one named Boyd, was it possible that the widow Lydia Boyd had been a Clark?
Although Isaac Clark chose to live in Pulaski County, his first land entries were in Miller County. Rarely does an individual move to a new area and buy land where he is a complete stranger. Who else bought land in Miller County at the same time? Among others was a man named Robert Boyd. A local history informed me that he moved to Missouri from Greenup County, Kentucky, and that his wife was Susanna Clark. A search of Greenup County, Kentucky, records revealed that Cary Boyd of Pulaski County, Missouri, was the son of Robert Boyd of Greenup County, Kentucky. (Cary was named in Robert’s will.) Marriages in Greenup County also revealed the marriage between Cary Boyd and Lydia Clark. In the 1830 census, Robert Boyd was listed next to John Clark. On 8 April 1823, Isaac Clark married Mary Horsley, and his father, John Clark, gave permission. Some of my assumptions had been wrong: Isaac had married earlier than I had thought, by a year. That was, however, fortunate for me, because he was underage and had to get permission to marry. I was now working in a county with records!
John Birchfield bought land in 1836 from the Springfield (Missouri) Land Office in the area that became Taney County in 1836. Taney County has lost all public records before the 1890s. The county had no newspaper until the 1880s. John Birchfield died about 1844, as the final settlement of his estate was announced in the newspaper of adjoining Greene County in 1847. The administrator had been James Birchfield. I had found James and John Birchfield mentioned in an 1834 estate record, which stated that they had replaced fences and corralled hogs. I was guessing that James was a son, but he had died before the 1850 census, leaving a young widow. Research on the Birchfields went nowhere.
At the same time, in the section of land where John Birchfield entered his federal land, an entry was made by Felix Enloe. So I traced Felix. He appeared on the 1835 tax list of Greene County, before Taney County was formed, but didn’t appear on the 1840 census, just four years later. As no county land records survived, I sent for the federal land entry files. I learned from case file #10 from the Springfield Land Office that on 25 January 1838, Felix Enloe, then of Franklin County, Missouri, assigned his parcel of land to John Birchfield.
The 1840 Missouri census index showed Felix Enloe living in Franklin County, Missouri, about 130 miles to the east. Moving my research to that area, in the adjoining county of Washington, I learned that in 1825, Felix Enloe had married Nancy “Burchfield.” The 1830 census of Washington County, Missouri, showed John Birchfield. Further research in Washington County, which still has its county records, confirmed he was the man who later settled in Taney County. With more family information gathered in Washington County, I easily traced him back to Franklin County, Kentucky.
Seth Moore and Isaac W.R. Moore took out adjoining federal land in Camden County, Missouri, a county that has no surviving public records before 1900. Isaac had disappeared by the 1840 census, but Seth remained; his entry in the 1850 census showed that he had children born in Tennessee in the early 1830s. Only one household showed the proper configuration in the 1830 Tennessee census, but it was in another badly burned county: Cocke County. With an Internet search, I was lucky to find Isaac W.R. Moore on the 1870 mortality schedule of Independence County, Arkansas. Research in that county showed him there in the 1860 and 1870 censuses, with children born in Tennessee. A man listed as “I.W.R. Moore” was head of household in Jefferson County, Tennessee, in 1850. Further research there uncovered Isaac White Rogers Moore’s father, Jesse, who left a will in Jefferson County dated 1849 in which he named not only his son Isaac, but his son “Seth, now in Missouri.”