The Family Tree Problem Solver: Tried-And-True Tactics for Tracing Elusive Ancestors (23 page)

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.

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.

Always check cemetery records and tombstones, where you can find “wife of” and sometimes “daughter of.” Marriage records can be difficult to locate in New York. The 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 the 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. 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.

1.
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.

2.
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 until 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.

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
!

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.

3.
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.