Remember that in some jurisdictions there may be separate courts for different functions. There may be a criminal court, a probate court, an orphan’s court, a court of equity, etc.
Make certain you have searched all the records–not just one court. It can be easy to overlook one court and not find what you are looking for.
Once in a while, non-deeds may be discovered with the actual land records. An ancestor died in 1893 in Illinois–no will and no probate. There apparently were no bills from the estate, other than funeral expenses. The oldest son filed an affidavit with the land records indicating that the farm was owned free and clear at the time of his father’s death. The affidavit partially explained why there was no estate settlement for the father either.
Sunday we’re offering a year of my weekly newsletter Casefile Clues for $12. Samples can be downloaded as PDF files here:
Remember that one document, a death certificate for example, may contain many statements. Those statements (about the birth, the parents, the date of death, the place of death, burial, cause of death, etc.) are not necessarily made by the same people. Each statement must be evaluated separately as the informant might not have been equally “informed” about every statement which they gave.
There is more to “proving” a date of birth, a place of marriage, or a maiden name than finding it written on one piece of paper. At the risk of oversimplifying, the researcher should be at the very least be considering:
If the members of a household were not all the children of the same father, keep in mind that the census taker might have simply assumed everyone in the household had the same last name, whether they did or not.
Consider getting a separate email address for your genealogy research and correspondence. There are several places to get free email addresses, Yahoo, Hotmail, Google, to name a few. You shouldn’t have to change it if your service provider changes, space is usually fairly generous, and web-based interfaces make it easy to check anywhere.
And for some of us, it helps to keep genealogy emails separate from those in our “other life.”
As you use family sources, interviews with Grandma, and stories that were passed down in your family to begin your research, keep in mind that there might be key details that relatives either forgot or intentionally neglected to tell you.
They can be as innocent as forgetting that great-grandpa lived in Idado for ten years and “came back home.”
Or they can be intentional, as in forgetting that Grandpa had a wife before he married Grandma and that he had five children with the previous wife.
Omissions can be inconsequential or serious roadblocks to your research. They can also be things Aunt Myrtle simply forgot or something cousin Harold never wanted you to find out.
I was using a burial register from England in my research. I had to constantly remind myself that the dates listed in the register were dates of burial, not dates of death. In most cases, the individuals probably had not been deceased long, but I need to make certain I record the information correctly.
Depending on the time period, the location, the number of nearby relatives and your ancestor’s financial status, your ancestor might never have had a tombstone.
Don’t assume that every person buried in a cemetery had a stone, even at one point in time. It’s possible there never was one.
