Courting South Carolina
… with some help from a friend … Reader Frank T. Jones found himself deep in the weeds of South Carolina legal research — and lost in its labyrinthine 19th century court structure. In tracing part of his in-laws’ family, he was focusing on...A question of citizenship
…or no federal court for you! It started out as a juicy divorce case, filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Indian Territory in October 1894. It ended up as a major fight over citizenship and what court had the right to hear the...About those annual reports
Remember the rule: no assumptions It is, The Legal Genealogist suggests, a reasonable assumption to make. Those annual reports from guardians in probate cases are really dull reading. So many of these guardianship accounts are little more than line entries with...Weathering the storms
Historical reports for genealogy Every couple of years, The Legal Genealogist faces a day like today. Where the snow is lightly falling and the forecast is for… Well… Something. Maybe a dusting. And maybe a blizzard. Something they’re calling a bomb...Learning the law
via LOC webinars Every genealogist has a happy place. For some, it might be the reading room in the National Archives of the United States in Washington, D.C. Or the special collections room of a particular library. Or the back room of a local courthouse that holds...Snippet: A new PERSI portal
Allen County Public Library has a new PERSI search Past halfway in the German Gothic and Fraktur course at the virtual Salt Lake Institute of Genealogist this week, and The Legal Genealogist continues to fight to slay those handwritten dragons. Is that really a...Snippet: Finding NC land
The not-exactly-lost have been found The Legal Genealogist’s brain is exploding here at mid-week. Is that a capital L in German script or a capital B? A lower-case E or lower-case N? Is that goofy-looking pen mark the “flag” of a capital K or is that...Loving the bad boys…
Newly digitized records of Alcatraz The Legal Genealogist is a total fangirl when it comes to the bad boys… and bad girls… of our family history. Because — sigh — the one thing they do that so many of our teachers and preachers and farmers...Not just for mariners!
New York City’s Marine Court Reader Nancy Spencer had a question that sent The Legal Genealogist scrambling for the law books. “My g-g grandfather was a policeman at the Marine court at Castle Garden,” she wrote. “Where would the record for his position be...Subscribe by Email
