Genealogy: Your Family's Hometown

Take with you the names, dates, and locations of your family members who resided in the county. Your goal is to find their birth dates, marriage dates, spouses, and death dates as starters. Stay alert for records that mention the churches they attended or their religion. (Knowing that, you can later determine if the church left records naming them.) A record showing where they were buried can supply you with leads. Each major event in their lives that has associated records can help identify their relatives and reveal snippets of their lives.

Your purpose is to find everything that could bear on your family. Nothing is too insignificant to note. Write down fully in your notes the day of your library trip, the name and address of the one you visited, and in which book or file you found the information so that you can find it again. In library holdings you might learn the following:

• Birth date and birthplace
• Names of parents
• Death dates and town or township
• Marriage date, place, and spouse
• Biography, possibly with photograph or pen sketch
• Military service
• Names and addresses of relatives and when they moved into the county or left the county.
• Occupations of parents and relatives
• Acreage owned by family members

You may initially be unable to locate something specific. Stick with it. As you learn more about the records, your success will increase. And with each success, your enthusiasm for the search will increase, too.

Shelves of Possibilities

After you start browsing the library shelves, you will begin to learn the many resources available. Books and finding aids of every description exist. Look for such things as these:

• Old Settlers' files
• Obituaries/necrology/funeral records
• Tombstone surveys
• Vertical family files
• County histories and indexes
• Published vital records
• Published deeds, probate and court records
• Scrapbooks
• Gazetteers and atlases
• Voting registers
• City directories
• School records
• Artifacts and photographs

Old Settlers Remembered

Many counties have projects to preserve information on their earliest settlers in what are commonly called “Old Settlers' files.” These may consist of recollections of descendants, biographies, or even taped interviews. Examine them for any of the surnames of your family who resided in the county. Note also the name and address of anyone who submitted information; they may be alive or might have family members still living. Contact with them could yield some wonderful memorabilia. Just remember not to accept what is written as “fact” until you have verified it.

Death Records

Many local libraries have indexed their early obituaries or established a necrology file. The content of the obituaries varies. Normally, those in smaller towns were more extensive than in larger cities. Check this file for members of your family. (See Obituaries and Genealogy.)

Vertical Files: Just Waiting to “Talk”!

As interest in genealogy intensifies, libraries receive letters of inquiry from all over the country. To preserve these, they often create “vertical files,” a set of folders stored in a filing cabinet usually by the family surname. Included may be letters, clippings, Bible records, photographs, research notes, charts, and others. These can yield new clues, and equally as important, may supply names of others seeking the family.

County Histories: The “Mug” Books

Almost every county in the United States has had at least one county history published, and some have several. They vary in content. Those published in the late 1800s or early 1900s typically consisted of brief histories of each of their townships or towns, churches, lodges, medical profession, schools, newspapers, county government, and notorious happenings, and even those who served in the military from the county. They may include the name and place of origin of the early pioneers of the area—who established the first grist mill, the first physician, town officers, and other similarly valuable information. Consult P. William Filby's Bibliography of American County Histories. Or in your Internet browser insert “bibliography county histories,” and listings for specific states will be displayed. Look in your library for town histories. Though town histories are not listed in Filby, many have been published.

The county histories are sometimes referred to as “mug books” because often they included biographies with photographs (or pen sketches) of the early citizens. The lack of a biography was no reflection on a person's standing in the community, however. The books were mostly on a subscription basis; those who paid were included, while others were not. To subscribe or not depended upon the frugality and monetary priorities of the individual. The histories published in the late 1800s were supplied by people far closer to the time of the events and should be (but aren't always) more accurate than recollections of present-day descendants.

View the mug books with caution. If the biography includes several earlier generations, there can be multiple errors caused by loss of memory or lack of knowledge of the family background. (Or even, sometimes, by a desire to elevate their standing in the community or to obscure details of a less-than-desirable past.) All facts must be confirmed. Nonetheless, the biographies are unique and provide an insight often lacking in any other source. You will learn of your ancestors' schooling, jobs, purchase of the farm, the church they attended, when they “found” religions, and other fascinating facts.

A common problem with published county histories is the absence of an index. Usually only the name of the subject in the biographies was listed; the other names within the sketch were not. And rarely were the names in the town and historical sections indexed. It can be a tedious process to locate your ancestor's name among the pages. Fortunately, many individuals or groups initiated projects to remedy this shortcoming. Even if an index has not been published, there may be a card index at the library created by locals for the histories of their own county.

Vital Records: The Facts of Life

Vital Records—births, marriages, and deaths—are among the richest of documents that help build the family tree. Searching them may take some effort because it often requires going to a variety of locations. They can be scattered among the shelves of the courthouse, city hall, county health department, local historical society, and even church and state archives. First, check at the library to see if anyone has compiled or published any of the local vital records. Although you don't want to rely upon the published version (because of possible omissions and errors in transcriptions), you can use it to initiate the search. The preface of the book of vital records might explain where the various records are housed, available time periods, and which vital records, if any, have been destroyed.

The Web Shines Here

The Internet provides a variety of ways in which you can supplement the search for a county's vital records. One valuable website is www.vitalrec.com. Or go to www.cyndislist.com, and scroll down to “Death Records,” (or to any of the other vital records listed there).

Another alternative is to go to www.usgenweb.org, and use their links to get to the state and county of your search. Examine the county website carefully to see if any of the vital records have been posted, published, or microfilmed.

At http://home.att.net/~wee-monster/deathrecords.html is a nifty website “Online Searchable Death Indexes for the U.S.A.” categorized by state. It includes obituaries, cemeteries, and the Social Security Death Index, in addition to death records.

Local Records

If you are fortunate, your county may be one for which abstracts of other early records have been published. These might include an assortment of land records: deed abstracts, surveys, land entries, and others. Though you should also examine the originals in the courthouse, the published records have the advantage of an all-name index for the book, whereas the courthouse clerks only index the main parties.

A multitude of other published abstracts might be found: court minutes, order books, wills, inventories, and others. Look for mention of members of your family and clues to relationships. Later you will make your first trip to the courthouse and experience the excitement of using the original records. For now the published books can aid you in understanding the variety of available records.

Excerpted from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Genealogy © 2005 by Christine Rose and Kay Germain Ingalls. All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Used by arrangement with Alpha Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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