It’s starting to feel as though we can’t even catch our breath before there’s yet another records access issue raising its head somewhere.

This time it’s California’s turn, and California genealogists are asking the broader community for help.

Here’s the problem:

The California Legislature has a habit of attaching unrelated riders — called bill trailers — to the state budget. These riders don’t have a thing to do with the subject matter of the budget, but they usually don’t have enough general support to get moved through the legislative process on their own. By attaching them to the budget, the supporters hope to get them through without anybody noticing — and without the public hearings and careful consideration that a separate piece of legislation requires.

One of the riders attached to the budget last week would allow California local agencies — usually defined as cities, counties, fire districts, school districts and other local authorities — to avoid many of the requirements of existing laws mandating public access to government information.

If this rider — which is now Section 4 of Assembly Bill 76 — is not line-item-vetoed by the Governor, things that are now required of local agencies will become optional. Among them:

     • Local agencies will no longer be required by law to respond to requests for government documents within specific time frames.

     • Local agencies will no longer be obligated to provide assistance to someone who wants a public document but isn’t sure exactly what document has the answer to the question.

     • Local agencies will no longer have to provide a written reason why they refuse access to a specific document requested by a member of the public.

Under the bill, the only thing cities and counties and other local agencies will have to do to get out from under current records access laws is announce, once a year, that they’re choosing to make the requirements optional.

Ugh.

Now it’s not entirely clear that this bill — if signed by the Governor — would pass muster under the California Constitution. Article I, section 3, of the California Constitution provides, in part:

SEC. 3. (a) The people have the right to instruct their representatives, petition government for redress of grievances, and assemble freely to consult for the common good.

(b)(1) The people have the right of access to information concerning the conduct of the people’s business, and, therefore, the meetings of public bodies and the writings of public officials and agencies shall be open to public scrutiny.

(2) A statute, court rule, or other authority, including those in effect on the effective date of this subdivision, shall be broadly construed if it furthers the people’s right of access, and narrowly construed if it limits the right of access. A statute, court rule, or other authority adopted after the effective date of this subdivision that limits the right of access shall be adopted with findings demonstrating the interest protected by the limitation and the need for protecting that interest.¹

But the California genealogical community would like our help to try to avoid the need for constitutional litigation over our access to vital records and other government documents held in the custody and control of local agencies that we rely on every day for our research.

So… let’s all of us — especially those with California roots — spare some time and let California’s Governor know just how bad an idea this is.

It won’t be as easy as it could be — California Governor Edmund G. (“Jerry”) Brown Jr. doesn’t accept email to an email address, only input via a contact form on his website: http://gov.ca.gov/m_contact.php. Or you can fax or call the office — the contact page has the fax and office number as well. Or you can email Brown’s legislative director, Gareth Elliott, at JLIB_HTML_CLOAKING .

As always, our task is to be polite educators: Section 4 of Assembly Bill No. 76 is bad law because it makes public access to records important to us an option rather than the right we are guaranteed under the California Constitution. It increases the likelihood of litigation, wiping out any savings the local agencies might achieve by making records access requirements optional. It undermines public confidence in government. And so it should be line-item-vetoed or, if that’s not possible the whole bill vetoed and sent back to be redone.

Those with California connections should mention them. My own family has lots of branches that headed west and settled in California, and this bill has the potential to greatly complicate my efforts to research those lines. I listed the counties and cities where my people’s records can be found in my comments.

Won’t you join me in supporting the right of our California colleagues — and that of all of us with California roots — to keep public records as accessible as they can be?

Any regular reader of this blog knows who The Legal Genealogist‘s favorite ancestor is.

Call him a rascal. A rogue. Even a scoundrel. But without my second great grandfather George Washington Cottrell and his misdeeds,¹ my family tree would be populated pretty much by farmers, laborers and preachers.

And it’d be downright boring.

The simple fact is that George is the cinnamon on my family’s breakfast toast. He’s the one ancestor I’ve found (so far!) who spices things up. And I am profoundly grateful for him and — even more — for the records that exist documenting his missteps.

Now imagine, for a moment, that George had had a right to clean up his officially recorded act. That instead of leaving records of his brushes with the law, he’d been allowed to require that the records be destroyed or, at a minimum, removed from public access.

Imagine that he’d had, in modern parlance, the right to be forgotten.

That’s the issue being debated these days in the European Union² and being touted as a direction in which the United States should also move.³ Proponents of a broad right to be forgotten argue that it is so easy for negative information to be posted online, to the detriment of personal privacy, we should be allowed to require that it be deleted — taken down — erased — just as easily.

After all, proponents ask, don’t we all have a right of personal privacy that allows us to have our misdeeds forgotten?

And that poses a dire and direct threat to our history — both personal and communal — and to the right of future generations to know what we did — and why. It is such a threat that archivists in Europe are coming together with petitions and ad campaigns to focus on the flip side of the proponents’ question: “What about our collective right to keep a record even of some things that others might prefer to forget?”⁴

It’s easy to write off the EU proposal for a broad right to be forgotten as addressing nothing more than the photo your college roommate took the time you first discovered that alcohol removed a few inhibitions along with, perhaps, a few more of your clothes than you’d be comfortable showing in public. Or that blog post you wrote five years ago that you no longer agree with.

None of us, I suspect, would disagree that we should be able to get that photo taken down and that we should be able to delete from our own sites the post we ourselves had written.

But consider this set of facts: how about an individual who fails to pay taxes, has a legal execution for the taxes filed against his home, and a newspaper notice is published about the sale of the home to satisfy the tax judgment? Should that person be allowed to require that all references to that be removed from public view — a right to have that be forgotten?

Think that’s far-fetched? There’s a lawsuit going on right now in the European Court of Justice that raises this exact question. The question in the case is posed in these terms:

Regarding the scope of the right of erasure and/or the right to object, in relation to the ‘derecho al olvido’ (the ‘right to be forgotten’) … (do) the rights to erasure and blocking of data … and the right to object … extend to enabling the data subject to address himself to search engines in order to prevent indexing of the information relating to him personally, published on third parties’ web pages, invoking his wish that such information should not be known to internet users when he considers that it might be prejudicial to him or he wishes it to be consigned to oblivion, even though the information in question has been lawfully published by third parties?⁵

Do we really want someone’s personal sensitivities under this kind of a “right to be forgotten” to erase, or remove from public view or access, this sort of information? Is an individual’s subjective view of what he wants known about himself going to be allowed to override society’s interest in preserving the truth of what our society is and what its individual members have and haven’t done?

And where does the line get drawn between a “right to be forgotten” and the records future generations will need to begin to understand us and our lives today? The fact is, much of what we know about our ancestors and our history comes from the little personal bits and pieces our ancestors left behind. The letters. The diaries. The scraps of paper with marginal notes.

Today, those kinds of records are exactly the kinds of records the EU’s proposed “right to be forgotten” would affect. As explained by Jean-Philippe Legois, president of the Association of French Archivists: “Today, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter — this is the correspondence of the 21st century. If we want to understand the society of today in the future, we have to keep certain traces.”⁶

As genealogists and family historians, we are all acutely sensitive to protecting and preserving access to the records of the past that we use, and want to continue to use, every day. It’s also part of our responsibility to help protect and preserve access to today’s records for tomorrow’s genealogists and family historians.

We need to keep an eye on this “right to be forgotten.” We all value our privacy, we all want the right to ensure that what is known about us is true.

But making mistakes is part of the human experience. They are what make us what we are. None of us wants to be remembered only for our mistakes. Yet none of us should want to be remembered for something — or as someone — we are not.

There’s nothing like a good family fight that ends up in court. If, that is, you can understand the lingo used in the court documents.

There’s almost always genealogical information of value tucked away in the records — in the case of The Legal Genealogist‘s Baker family, information about the offspring of a third great grand-uncle Josiah Baker of Bakersville, Mitchell County, North Carolina. But oy! For a non-lawyer, reading the court file could be painful.

Josiah, who died in Bakersville in 1881, had seven sons — but two (William and David) died in childhood and three (Newton, John and Joseph) died in the Civil War. Only two — Theodore and Charles — survived him. But Newton had had a son before he died,¹ and therein lies the tale.

Newton Vance Baker was the son of Josiah’s first-born, Newton A. Baker and his wife Hannah Ledford.² And in 1884, he sued his Uncle Charles over a land deal.

The court papers indicate that, before his death, Josiah deeded his land to his two surviving sons, Theodore and Charles.³

But, grandson N. Vance Baker claimed, there was a side deal between Josiah the father and Charles the son, who got a bigger piece of land than son Theodore: Charles was to buy a tract of 56 acres of land called the Dogwood Flats, and that land was to go to grandson Vance. The total price was $450, Charles was to pay it off over time, and Charles did “immediately put (Vance) in possession of the … tract … on which he at once began to work and … continued to work thereon ever since, taking and using the profits and proceeds thereof.”⁴

The hitch was that, by 1884, Charles hadn’t paid the whole purchase price, the seller of the Dogwood Flats was in court trying to get the land back, and Vance was caught in the middle. So he sued.

And, in his suit, he alleged:

Plaintiff is advised that by the terms, in parol, accompanying the deed by the … said Josiah Baker and assented to by the defendant, a trust was created in favor of the plaintiff which attached to the conveyance of the lands to defendant and which a Court clothed with Equitable Jurisdiction can enforce.⁵

“The terms in parol”? Say what?

Yep. To exactly understand what Vance was arguing, we need to understand yet another of those murky “why-won’t-they-just-speak-English” terms lawyers use.

And this isn’t a case of misspelled parole (with an e). Parol is a different word altogether — and it simply means spoken or oral, “expressed or evidenced by speech only; not expressed by writing; not expressed by sealed instrument.”⁶

Notice that there are two possibilities in that definition: either the side agreement was entirely verbal, never written down in any way; or that it was “not expressed by sealed instrument.” That’s because “the common law draws only one great line, between things under seal and not under seal.”⁷

In this particular case, the court papers don’t ever mention any writing, so in context it’s clear that this was one of those “not worth the paper it wasn’t written down on” handshake deals. Had there been any written evidence that the side agreement existed, it would have been one of the exhibits submitted to the court — and there was no such exhibit.

You’ll come across the term in a lot of legal records and court opinions discussing evidence. Other contexts in which it’s common include:

     • Parol arrest. One ordered by a judge or magistrate from the bench, without written complaint or other proceedings, of a person who is present before him, and which is executed on the spot; as in case of breach of the peace in open court.⁸

     • Parol evidence. Oral or verbal evidence; that which is given by word of mouth; the ordinary kind of evidence, given by witnesses in court.⁹

     • Parol lease. A lease of real estate not evidenced by writing, but resting in an oral agreement.¹⁰

     • Parol promise. A simple contract; a verbal promise.¹¹

And there’s one more that’s a bit different. You may come across a “parol demurrer” in very old court documents. That was a term used in early court cases involving land where one of the parties — usually the defendant — was still a minor. It meant that the case was suspended until the minor came of age.¹²

And young Vance? The case dragged through the courts for 10 years until it was finally dismissed at Vance’s request in 1894.¹³ In 1900, he was a boarder in the home of the Taylor family, whose daughter Phoebe became his second wife.¹⁴ He died at the age of 81 in Caldwell County, North Carolina, in 1944.¹⁵

Doesn’t look like he kept that land at all.

For a change of pace this Father’s Day, The Legal Genealogist celebrates the fathers of my generation: my brothers who are fathers.

Evan

My older brother Evan and his daughter, my niece Gina, petting a lion cub in a refuge in South Africa. Gina, one of two children, changed Evan’s life this year by presenting him with his first grandson, Martin. Evan has always said he would never retire because he loves what he does (he’s a family physician). Within 36 hours of Martin’s birth, he told me he wanted to retire and take his grandson fishing. I told him he might want to wait until Martin learns to walk.

Paul

My younger brother Paul and his first two sons Rudi (foreground) and Max (on Paul’s lap). Son Stefan and daughter Katya (who just graduated with honors from Northern Arizona University) round out this family.

Fred

My younger brother Fred with daughter Bobbi, who has made him a grandfather three times over. Sydney, Phoenix and Addyson are coming on strong in our next generation — smart, funny and cute as can be. (Of course.)

Bill

And my youngest brother Bill with his first-born, Dennis, who — like his younger brother Duncan — is my godson. In typical southern-family fashion, Bill’s two boys are the youngest of the cousins, 10 years younger than the next youngest in their generation, which we figure will probably confuse tomorrow’s genealogists.

Happy Father’s Day, guys!

There is nothing in this world like spending a night in your own bed after 10 days away — and waking up to news that is not just Good News, it’s downright TERRIFIC.

That’s this Saturday morning for The Legal Genealogist — and the news out of the Peach State is WONDERFUL NEWS for the entire genealogical community.

You ready to smile?

Here goes:

You remember that horrible day in September last year when the Georgia Secretary of State decided that he couldn’t afford to keep the Georgia Archives open — that the two-day-a-week schedule to which the Archives’ hours had already been slashed was still too expensive?¹

You remember how the genealogical community banded together and fought it — and fought it — and fought it — and we finally won a victory when control of the Archives was transferred from the Secretary of State to the University of Georgia System?²

But you remember that the budget for the Archives as part of the transfer only had just a little bit more money in it, and it didn’t look like it’d really be enough to make things any better — just keep them from getting worse?³

Well, how about this? The good folks at GeorgiaArchivesMatters — volunteers from the Georgia Genealogical Society — went to a meeting yesterday with Georgia Archives Director Christopher Davidson and here’s what was reported on the GeorgiaArchivesMatters blog:

At today’s Lunch and Learn program, Georgia Archives Director Christopher Davidson announced that the Archives will be adding staff, increasing hours for part-time employees and, yes, opening to the public for two additional days per week.

Here are the highlights:

• Hiring three additional professionals
• Increasing part-time staff hours
• Opening to the public on Wednesdays and Thursdays beginning July 31. Weekly hours will be Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.
• Increasing conservation and processing activities of the Archives collections.⁴

Let me repeat that:

Starting 31 July, the Georgia Archives will be open four days a week, Wednesday-Saturday, 8:30 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Talk about moving in the right direction!!!

A big THANK YOU to the Georgia Legislature for acting responsibly to conserve and protect this critical repository of priceless records of our common past, to the University of Georgia System for its support of and commitment to the Archives, and to all the genealogists in and out of the State of Georgia for their untiring efforts to save the Georgia Archives for us all.

SOURCES

In the late 1990s, the United States Patent Office issued patents to a Utah company on two human genes called BRCA1 and BRCA2, genes that — if present — cause a significantly elevated risk of breast and ovarian cancer.

The patents gave the company — Myriad Genetics — a monopoly on testing women for the presence of those genes. Armed with its patents, the company went after academic and medical researchers to stop them from trying to test for the genes and jacked the price of its test up to as much as $4,000.

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Patent Office was wrong. In its unanimous ruling in the case of Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, the Court held that “a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated.”¹

In other words, nobody can get a patent on genes that occur naturally in your body or mine. And that is Very Good News, indeed.

The Court explained that what Myriad did was discover “the precise location and sequence of what are now known as the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.” It went on:

Mutations in these genes can dramatically increase an individual’s risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. The average American woman has a 12- to 13-percent risk of developing breast cancer, but for women with certain genetic mutations, the risk can range between 50 and 80 percent for breast cancer and between 20 and 50 percent for ovarian cancer.²

It reviewed the bottom line in American jurisprudence on the patentability of purely natural phenomena:

We have “long held that …[:] Laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas are not patentable.” … Rather, “‘they are the basic tools of scientific and technological work’” that lie beyond the domain of patent protection. … As the Court has explained, without this exception, there would be considerable danger that the grant of patents would “tie up” the use of such tools and thereby “inhibit future innovation premised upon them.” … This would be at odds with the very point of patents, which exist to promote creation.³

In striking down the Myriad Genetics’ patents on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, the Court noted that:

It is undisputed that Myriad did not create or alter any of the genetic information encoded in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. The location and order of the nucleotides existed in nature before Myriad found them. Nor did Myriad create or alter the genetic structure of DNA. Instead, Myriad’s principal contribution was uncovering the precise location and genetic sequence of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes within chromosomes 17 and 13. … Myriad did not create anything. To be sure, it found an important and useful gene, but separating that gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention.⁴

The Court was careful to limit its holding to the patent on the genes themselves, and not to the creation of artificial versions of the genetic material in the laboratory. And there’s nothing in the opinion that will stop the Patent Office from issuing a patent on a treatment for a genetic ailment or a particular method of manipulating DNA in order to detect a genetic ailment.

Those activities are useful scientific advances that work to everyone’s advantage and help achieve the purposes of the patent statutes: to promote creation.

However, between this decision yesterday and the decision by the Supreme Court last year in Mayo Medical Labs. v. Prometheus Labs.,⁵ it’s clear that the Court will not allow companies to use the patent laws to lock up genes or parts of genes occurring in nature nor to claim a monopoly on the mere fact that having gene A results in a higher-than-average risk of condition B.

So what does this all mean for genetic genealogists?

    • First, nobody else owns our DNA — and nobody else can get a patent on it.

    • Second, nobody else can claim an exclusive right to test our DNA.

    • Third, nobody else can tell us that we can’t test a specific part of our DNA that may contain information useful for family history (including family medical history).

    • Fourth, nobody else can tell us that the only way we can test a specific part of our DNA that may contain information useful for family history (including family medical history) is to pay one company a price it can inflate to its heart’s content because there’s no competition.

If you think I’m overstating the case here, read yesterday’s blog post “Supreme Court Decision – Genes Can’t Be Patented” by Roberta Estes at DNA-Explained. She quotes Gene by Gene, parent company of Family Tree DNA, as stating it could do the BRCA1 and BRCA2 testing — and will immediately start doing so through its DNATraits division — for less than one fourth the amount Myriad Genetics has been charging.⁶

Now I want to repeat what I wrote about this issue last year, because I do have a dog in this hunt and my views on this issue are distinctly biased. I wrote then:

I am a breast cancer survivor. I was faced a few years ago with the question of whether to have a genetic test for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that greatly enhance a woman’s chances of developing breast and/or ovarian cancer. Because of a lack of family history and the specific kind of cancer I had, my insurance company was unwilling to pay for the test.

One hitch: Myriad Genetics holds the patent on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. … Myriad Genetics didn’t create the gene, or change the person’s status or condition, or change the fact that people with BRCA1 or BRCAC2 have an elevated risk of cancer. All it did was patent the connection and say nobody else could test for BRCA1 and BRCA2.

And because of Myriad’s patent — a patent that’s been challenged in the courts for years without final resolution — I couldn’t shop around. I had one choice for the test — Myriad — and the cost would have been more than $4,000.

After consulting with a genetic counselor, I opted not to have the test. But at least, for me, it was an option. If my life had been on the line, I could have found the $4,000. For many women, coming up with that much cash is out of the question, especially in light of all the other costs of cancer treatment.⁷

It is, therefore, with profound personal as well as genealogical relief that I can say, today, it looks like the Supreme Court is Getting This Right.

At least so far.

About mid-week during an immersive genealogy institute like the Institute for Genealogical and Historical Research (IGHR) at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, students’ brains start to go on overload.

There is so much to learn and so much to share that trying to stay on top of all the information can be overwhelming. And when you’re teaching on top of learning as The Legal Genealogist has been… well… at least I keep writing down notes about cool resources!

And here are two more, both neat ways to get into some of the really underused resources of genealogy — manuscripts and other unpublished materials.

The first is called Repositories of Primary Sources. It’s a website at the University of Idaho compiled by Terry Abraham, Head of Special Collections and Archives at the University of Idaho Library:

This site is essentially a Cyndi’s List for primary source materials. It describes itself as a “listing of over 5000 websites describing holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources for the research scholar.”

Materials are organized geographically, and there are category links to:

    • Western United States and Canada
    • Eastern United States and Canada: States and Provinces A-M
    • Eastern United States and Canada: States and Provinces N-Z
    • Latin America and the Caribbean
    • Europe A-M
    • Europe N-Z
    • Asia and the Pacific
    • Africa and the Near East
    • Additional Lists
    • State, Province, Country Index
    • Integrated Index/List

The second is called ArchiveGrid, and it’s another way to get into and find archival records like manuscripts. It’s a service of OCLC (the Online Computer Library Center):

ArchiveGrid describes itself as “a collection of nearly two million archival material descriptions,” covering “collections held by thousands of libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives.” It “provides access to detailed archival collection descriptions, making information available about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and other archival materials (and) contact information for the institutions where the collections are kept.”

Since so much of what we really want to learn about the families we research is hidden away in these primary sources, these are resources I can’t wait to use to see what turns up…

The Legal Genealogist said yesterday that there’s “nothing in the genealogical world to compare to an institute: a week-long intensive immersive experience that is exhilarating, exhausting, entertaining and educational — often all at the same time.”

What I forgot was … time-consuming.

Classes here at the Institute for Genealogical and Historical Research (IGHR) at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, start at 8 a.m. They’re immersive — you’re really focusing on trying to absorb all the new information being thrown your way at a fast and furious pace.

And with the evening sessions — I’m speaking each of the regular evening-session evenings, with The Ethical Genealogist Monday night, A Family For Isabella last night and The ABCs of DNA tonight — the days aren’t over until after 7 p.m.

Then there are all the people you haven’t seen since last year, and all the new friends you have a chance to make, and…

There aren’t enough hours in the days.

So … two quick new resources — new to me, at least.

First, from course coordinator J. Mark Lowe, CG, comes the Historical Census Browser at the University of Virginia Library website. This is a totally cool way to display graphically the demographics of the United States as a whole or any part of it over time.

Here, for example, is a map of the United States showing the concentrations of people living in the United States as of the 1900 census who were born in Germany:

There are lots of ways to use this. For example, you could create maps of just one state and watch the population density change from census to census. Go on and play with it. It’s terrific.

And from instructor Michael Hait comes this link to the Randy Majors version of Historical U.S. County Boundary Maps where you can see the historical county lines overlaying a Google Maps image of any location you choose, and you can add in the courthouses, churches, cemeteries and libraries in the area if you choose.

Here’s an example for the town of Centre, in Cherokee County, Alabama, from which a number of my ancestors hailed. I sure hope the mapping is incomplete. I’d hate to think there weren’t any churches or cemeteries in Cherokee County as of 1880!

Again, go ahead and play with it. You may find out all kinds of neat things about the places you — or your ancestors — called home.

There is literally nothing in the genealogical world to compare to an institute: a week-long intensive immersive experience that is exhilarating, exhausting, entertaining and educational — often all at the same time.

Elizabeth Crabtree Wells

This is my fourth year at IGHR, which is co-sponsored by the Board for Certification of Genealogists. This year, I’m teaching Copyright for Genealogists in Course 6: Genealogy as a Profession, coordinated by Elissa Scalise Powell, CG, CGL, and presenting three evening lectures on ethics, indirect evidence and DNA.

And… wonder of wonders… I’m getting to learn more about researching my family.

My mother’s kinfolk traveled all over the American south. The only state south of the Mason-Dixon line where I don’t have ancestors (or at least close collaterals) is Florida. And I am having a ball in Research in the South, a course with varying content each year — and this year it’s Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi — all states where I have roots.

The course is coordinated by J. Mark Lowe, CG, who offered some terrific insights into migration patterns in the south, and the instructors yesterday were Deborah Abbott, Ph.D., on Mississippi records, and Elizabeth Crabtree Wells, coordinator of the Special Collection Department of the Samford University Library, on religious records from the South.

I wouldn’t dream of depriving you of the joy of learning for yourself the wonders of the institute experience… but I also wouldn’t dream of not sharing two very neat resources I learned about yesterday.

The first, from Deborah Abbott, is the J.B. Cain Archives of Mississippi Methodism at the Millsaps College Library in Jackson, Mississippi. If you have a Mississippi circuit-riding preacher in your ancestry the way I do, this is a must-visit location. The records aren’t online, but hey… you wanted an excuse to visit the ancestral homeland, right? This is a good one.

From Liz Wells came some absolute gems that had everybody in the class sitting up and taking note. She showed a series of maps, showing the spread of various religions across the United States. They are from an atlas that was new to me and, from the reactions of others, new to most of the class.

It’s a book called the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, by Charles O. Paullin, edited by John K. Wright, and originally published by the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the American Geographical Society of New York.²

It was published in 1932, so it’s still under copyright — that means you won’t find it on Google Books.

But you can find it online.

The University of Michigan has digitized the atlas and in all its glory it’s online at the University of Michigan Digital Library.

It’s not all that easy to use — you have to work through the individual pages of the table of contents and/or the index to find the subject matter you want and then open each text page or atlas image (plate) individually. But it’s absolutely worth the effort to see this first class piece of work.

Remember: still in copyright so don’t copy the pages and put ‘em up on your blog or Ancestry or FamilySearch. This is a research reference only.

I can’t wait to see what the rest of the week holds!

The Georgia Constitution of 1777 recognized a grand total of eight counties. By 1800, there were 24. By the end of 1832, there were 89. By 1875, there were 137; by 1924, 161; and by virtue of the consolidation of Milton and Campbell Counties into Fulton County in 1932, the current number stands at 159.¹

And, according to a terrific little book by Paul K. Graham, CG, AG, “75 of the state’s counties have suffered 109 events resulting in the loss or severe damage of their courthouse or court offices.”²

Ouch.

For those of us with Georgia ancestors, that hurts.

But better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, and the last thing any genealogist wants to do is set off on a road trip to a courthouse that no longer has the records needed or to write an article saying records weren’t examined because of a courthouse fire that … um, er … never happened.

Either of those horribles is easily prevented. Just get a copy of Graham’s nifty little book Georgia Courthouse Disasters, just recently published.

It lists each and every one of those disasters, in alphabetical and in chronological orders, and provides a vignette of the type (or types) of disaster in each county and when each occurred — together with citations to the original sources of the information used to compile the.

One small example, for Toombs County:

Early in the morning of November 21, 1917, the Toombs County courthouse at Lyons was completely destroyed. The county was only twelve years old. Its records were safe in vaults.
“Courthouse is Destroyed,” Macon Daily Telegraph, November 22, 1917, p. 14.³

Perhaps the single most useful feature to the book beyond the simple utility of a one-stop source for record loss caused by disasters are the maps showing the impacts of record losses.

Remember that today’s counties are smaller than the original counties were and so a record loss in, say, Dooly County in 1847 impacted records covering land that today is in Wilcox, Turner, Lee, Crisp and Macon Counties as well as what is today Dooly County.⁴

The book is only 63 pages, 68 with the index, a neatly bound paperback in a size that’s easy to use and convenient to carry. It’s available from Amazon.com as a paperback for $5.39 or as a Kindle book for $2.99.

A must-have for Georgia researchers.

Highly recommended.

Note: The Legal Genealogist was given a copy of the book for review purposes.