Tracking down twentieth and twenty-first century relatives can be problematic, but it is sometimes necessary in order to determine DNA matches or see if living family members may have family information, ephemera, or pictures. Sometimes a person can find one relative when others seem to go missing. The difficulties are magnified when the relative is a female who may have had “one more” husband than the researcher was aware of. While FindAGrave has its issues (not all cemeteries entries are complete), consider searching for those missing relatives in the cemetery where you’ve found one of them. On a side note, I’ve sometimes spent just a little time trying to figure out why a relative was buried in an unexpected cemetery. Sometimes that can be a clue that the […]
Local land records are not just deeds involving property transfer between grantors and grantees. They may contain court orders that impact property title (such as partitions), affidavits (from heirs or others testifying to certain aspects of property title), contracts (to purchase a piece of property or between two individuals with their own property preparing to marry), etc. Occasionally someone who never bought or sold property can appear in a document recorded with the land records. An uncle of mine filed an affidavit in the 1890s after his father died stating that there was no debt on the property and that all his father’s last bills had been paid). The son did not sell the property, but filed the affidavit because the family had not gone through a probate […]
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