If Your Ancestor Owned Land, Then There’s a Deed

“If Your Ancestor Owned Land, Then There’s a Deed,” by William Dollarhide

Dollarhide’s Genealogy Rule #23: Locating the county where your ancestor lived is the first step in finding records about the time he was hauled into court for shooting his neighbor’s dog, threatening the census taker with a shotgun, or making illegal corn whiskey behind the barn. A 90-Percent Chance Since the first colonists came to[…]Read more

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County Boundary Changes

Census Records and County Boundary Changes, by William Dollarhide

All censuses taken since 1790 are tabulated and organized by the counties within each state or territory. By federal precedence, the county is the basic unit of jurisdiction for census demographics. Alaska is the only state without counties; therefore, judicial districts are used as jurisdictions for the censuses taken there. In Louisiana, the term “parish”[…]Read more

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finding woman's maiden name

89 Places for Finding a Woman’s Maiden Name: A Checklist of Sources, by William Dollarhide

Discovering the maiden name of a female is often the biggest problem we have in genealogy. Whether you are researching your families in person, through the mail, or by Googling the Internet for sources, the basic search is still the same. As in all research tasks, we need to identify the possible places where such[…]Read more

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