Visiting County Court Records Offices
County court records are a vital source of genealogical information, along with state and federal records. Another takeoff point when doing some 'ancestor research' is the municipal court records office. Each of these court levels has its own set of court records. Counties may be regarded as provinces or specific regions. Close to 3,000 counties make up the United States and just about every county court maintains a set of court records.
Getting Ancestral Clues from County Court Records
Once you reach a point in your ancestor research where you're able to place ancestors in a particular location at a given timeframe, it's time to pay the local courthouses a visit. County and local jurisdiction courts often contain information regarding people's ancestors and their day-to-day dealings.What court records are available at a particular county court will largely depend on the province or state it's located in, individual practices of the county and the time period covered. But for the most part, the same essential county court documents - wills, probate docs, taxes, marriages, land deeds and guardianship records - are created for each locality.
Locating Ancestors through County Court Records
The first and most important step in court records research is finding out where a person's ancestors lived so he can determine which direction they most likely took to do their business. Keep in mind though - the county court housing someone's ancestors' records won't always be the same one that's currently serving the county that they resided in.- Geography might have made travel to other courthouses easy for a person's ancestors. Although court records like taxes and land deeds need to be filed within the area where their home was situated, his ancestors might have chosen to take a shorter trip to the neighboring county courthouse to obtain stuff like marriage licenses.
- County along with other political boundary limits eventually change. This means that the government that had jurisdictional authority over an individual's ancestors' town sometime in the 1800s quite possibly doesn't have jurisdiction over it today.
Digging through mounds of county court documents is a lot of work. That's why it doesn't hurt to come to the county court prepared. Get a detailed map, research on the changing boundaries and list down the most likely county court office candidates. If your first courthouse stop has all the county court record materials you require, then visiting the others is no longer necessary. But otherwise, proceed to the other courthouses on your sheet.
If the county court records you look at don't turn up anything useful, it's possible that they've been moved to the state, central or provincial archives. Microfilmed versions are usually available as reference guides at courthouses. Family history centers, genealogical and historical societies and local libraries could also contain microfilm copies, indexes and other useful county court record leads. Running searches using the major online search engines could also turn up useful information.
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