Drawing the lines
When county borders get fuzzy As genealogists we all know how counties are created, right? The legislature of the appropriate jurisdiction — colony, territory or state — passes a law creating the new county and setting out its borders. Kind of like what...A fractional case
To understand the records, understand the law The Legal Genealogist is looking back over Alabama court cases in anticipation of this weekend’s 2019 Alabama Genealogical Society seminar at Samford University. And there’s still not much to beat 1/4 of 1/8 of...Birthing a cousin
It really shouldn’t be this hard… She was born 110 years ago today in a little town in Wichita County, Texas. Or maybe not. And The Legal Genealogist is getting really annoyed at finding these gaps in the research files… Typically on a family...The courts versus the Family Bible
Always always doublecheck Everything about the entries in the Family Bible says they should be believed. Those two final deaths entered on the family pages were written in two different inks and two different handwritings — or at least by one person at two very...Oh, and by the way…
… the war is over It may be one of the things The Legal Genealogist loves best about genealogy. Learning all those things about history that we never learned in school. Our obligation as family historians, of course, is to put our families into the context of...Changing gears
… legally speaking … Sometimes just knowing what the law is, isn’t enough. Sometime what we need to know is how and when the law changed. After yesterday’s blog post about expatriation and some of the records created by repatriation,1 a reader...Oh, that Babe
A lesson from the records It’s a birth record from more than a century ago. A male child born 6 February 1895 in Baltimore, Maryland. It records a singular moment of American history — sports history, to be exact. And it offers a perfect example of what we...Do as I say!
Not as I did… You’d think by then The Legal Genealogist would have learned. I mean, seriously, by the time I was entering that information in my genealogy database program, I’d have thought my experience with one particular part of working with...Where is that place?
Here’s one way to find it… A genealogist across the country needed to know the physical proximity of two New Jersey cemeteries to try to understand how a burial in one cemetery got reported by a Find A Grave contributor as having been in the other —...Subscribe by Email
