ROOTS & BRANCHES

One of my all-time favorite icebreaker anecdotes is the will of a woman named Kate Daub, who disinherits two of her children – with the claim that one of them had tried to kill her! – and left a life estate for a live-in boyfriend.

She was truly a woman ahead of her time, since this will was written in 1900.

I would have never recalled it but when I was looking at old files from when I used to teach continuing ed courses on genealogy in the early 1990s, I was already using the Kate Daub will as an example of the gems of data that could be gleaned from courthouse records.

Whether the documents related to estates or deeds showing transfers of real estate – as well as divorces and criminal court dockets – all of these types of records are traditionally in the custody of one or another office of county courthouses.

What’s happened since I first put Kate Daub’s will in that genealogy curriculum is that a lot of courthouse resources are now accessible away from the courthouse.

Most of the time this is through digitization of the records, but there’s also been a trend toward counties having their own separate archives or working out partnerships with county genealogical or historical societies to house and maintain their older records.

Probably on the forefront of digitization are the offices that hold land records (called “recorder of deeds” in Pennsylvania). This is a byproduct of the fact that the deeds have a business value in that title searchers need them to prove that a property’s title is not encumbered in some way that would imperil a new owner.

Other records have been digitized through grants; county naturalization papers granting citizenship are often prime fodder to be put online.

And with the digitization by FamilySearch of its holdings – including the estate files from many counties across the country – more of these valuable courthouse documents are popping up online.

Which leads a problem that always nags me with searchable online records: Have I seen everything that a courthouse has to offer? For example, many of the FamilySearch estate files only include the wills – and often the versions of the wills recopied into bound volumes at that. That’s why there is still often a need for a road trip!

Of course, since my continuing ed course was being held in Lebanon, the prime example I used was the Lebanon County Courthouse. Things have changed there a bit – some of their older records have been sent to the county historical society and a few things can be found online.

The presentation on courthouse research was the third session of the continuing ed course. Next up, I finally got around to telling people about the U.S. Census, and that’s what I’ll tackle in next week’s “Roots & Branches” column.