Discovered a relative was arrested on assault charges in 1917. The court records I could find online only indicated the arrest. The verdict could not be located. I need to see if there are more records in the jurisdiction where the arrest took place.
I decided to perform a newspaper search and did find where he paid a rather steep fine–at least by 1918 standards–for the crime. Whenever I discover someone has been arrested, I always search newspapers to see what can be found. I did not perform a manual search for the week he was arrested, which I need to do.
That said, I still need to manually search the court records to see what I overlooked. I also need to manually search the newspapers as well.
This is why our research log needs to indicate specifically what we searched and how. Searches via full-text databases of records can locate material that would have been tedious to find before, but we need to indicate how we searched the records.
A digital search of a full-text database is not the same as manually searching records.
No responses yet