I'm Laurie Werner Castillo, and welcome to Search All the Jurisdictions and Find More Records. I'm glad you joined me today for a discussion of what I think is one of the most important concepts in successful genealogy research.

Conrad Hilton received a call from a Texas dignitary informing him that he had been selected as the Texan of Distinction, to be honored at ceremonies that year. Conrad had begun his career as a hotelier in Texas during the original oil boom, when the population was exploding and accommodations were so limited. Shortly before the event, he received another call from the same official, who this time sounded quite distressed. "You were born in San Antonio weren't you?" "Yes, San Antonio, Sacorro, New Mexico."

"Oh my. Well, I guess you will be the first honorary Texan of Distinction." So it appears that somebody had messed up on the fact checking. Has that ever been you?

Alan Alda once said, "Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in." And we're going to refer several times today to assumptions being absolutely dangerous and something you've got to watch out for. There are two parts to the definition of "jurisdiction." The first is the power and authority to hear and decide cases. The second is the territory in which the court may exercise such power. This is what we will focus on today. It's crucial to know and understand the correct jurisdictions when searching for records. It's not enough to know where; you must also know when. You cannot really know where to look until you know when, because things change so much. That is why when + where = jurisdiction. Okay, we're going to talk about things you should know about U.S. jurisdictions. Every part of this country belonged to someone else first.

Just stop and think about that one. And the early--so the early records of your family may be in another country.

If your ancestor was born before the Fourth of July in 1776, it was not in the USA. How, then, do you record the place? You always in genealogy list the location as it was at the time of the event that you're researching. If your ancestor was born in 1695 in Hartford, Hartford County, then you would list the place as Hartford, Hartford, Connecticut Colony.

Sometimes it gets complicated. I have Texas ancestry--so does my husband. There were at least six flags over Texas; that's not just the name of a theme park, okay? [LAUGHTER] So there were--you can see France, Spain, Mexico, Republic of Texas, and the Confederacy were the other countries that it belonged to and has been since then, most of the time, the state of Texas in the last 150 years. Other independent republics that became states that often we don't realize this was the case are Vermont, California, and Hawaii--there we go. I'm from California, so I knew that one. Let's take a close look at Vermont. In 1609 Vermont was claimed by France. In 1763 it was ceded to England following the Seven Years' War. From 1763 to 1777 rival claims between New Hampshire and New York were causing a lot of consternation. Both were making land grants in the same area, which had been dubbed the New Hampshire Grants. I don't know why. In January of 1777 they decided to rename it the Republic of New Connecticut, okay? Then we would have had New Connecticut and Old Connecticut--I don't know. Anyway, and by June of that year, they decided that wasn't any good, and they renamed it the Vermont Republic. And it stayed that way for 14 years and was actually an independent republic during the Revolution and didn't become a state until 1791, the 14th. So interesting set of jurisdictional issues there. Every dwelling or parcel of land in the United States is in multiple jurisdictions. This is not just state, county, and city; there are more jurisdictions that affect both our own lives and our research regarding the lives of our ancestors. Some of those might be federal district court, state district court, county court, federal and state congressional and senate districts, and then there's all kinds of tax districts. You know how they're going to get you coming and going--well, that's not new. There are tax districts, federal, state, county, special services, and then even districts for voting, school, post offices, and many more. So that gives us a lot to think about. Jurisdictions change. Let's look at an example here. In Utah in 1849, when Utah was organized, there was one judicial district that covered the entire territory, which was headquartered in Salt Lake City. By 1988 the Eighth District was formed, and this structure is still in force today. But what about the period between 1849 and 1988, when these seven other districts were formed? How do we figure that out? Good question. I went to the Utah State Archives website, which contains some very useful charts regarding historical court jurisdictions. This is the piece of the chart showing that Uintah County has been in three different districts over the course of time--it gives the years and everything--and that Utah County has been in four districts, one of them twice, so very useful. This would be critical information to locating all the court records of your ancestors. There are religious jurisdictions in our lives. For example, the Catholic Church has parishes, dioceses, archdiocese, and ecclesiastical provinces, and records are kept on different levels. We need to know what the organizational levels are in any given church and how that affected record keeping and storage. Religious groups may also have schools, orphanages, and hospitals that cover a specific jurisdiction. So we need to find out about the religion of our ancestors: What types of records did they keep? Where are they now? And where is headquarters? There are other entities in our lives that also have jurisdictions. You see a list of some of the possibilities here, fraternal organizations like the Masons, business and trade unions, ethnic heritage groups, religious groups, benevolent service or cause groups, lineage and historic, military or veterans groups. And so each of these are typically organized in state and local units, and they keep records. And so the thing you need to find out is what existed in the area where your ancestors lived at that time. And one of the best ways to do that is city directories and maybe county histories, so be watching for those kind of things. Another way to find out is, are there insignia on his or her tombstone? And what does the obituary say? Have you found any--if you have the effects from your ancestors--have you found any memorabilia such as a membership card or regalia such as a pin, a badge, hat, or other uniform component? So jurisdictions change over time, and I have one thing. All I can say is, "Buckle up. Here we go; we're going to take a run through some of the things that can happen." So what kind of changes? There were boundary changes. There were county seat and state capital changes. The responsibilities change. The state and territory where a town or a county was located may change. There have been name changes aplenty and mapping or surveying mistakes, you know? They didn't have GPS back then, okay? So sometimes the surveyors had problems.

Let's look at Virginia as a classic example here. In the beginning, according to the British, Virginia extended to the west coast of North America. You can see the map: there's 1775, and by 1783, according to Virginians, it extended to the north clear to Pennsylvania and included what would become the Northwest Territory. That's that big blue zone there around the Great Lakes, so that tells you how far up they were claiming. By 1787, in the fourth square there, when the Constitution was ratified, the Northwest Territory had been ceded by Virginia, and that's what Virginia looked like. By 1792 the birth of Kentucky had reduced the western extent of Virginia. The last major change occurred when West Virginia was formed, and they did that in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, when no one was really paying attention to object, you know? But it wasn't over. I don't know if you can see that little tiny arrow that's pointing to the apex of Virginia there in the last map, that little blue spot at the top? That spot includes Berkeley and Jefferson Counties. And that area was not ceded to West Virginia until 1867, four years later. So that means that if your ancestor lived in Berkeley or Jefferson County, she could have been born in Virginia for four more years and still ended up in West Virginia without moving. So all I can say is, stuff happens, you know? And sometimes people ask me about consistency. Well, you know, we're not big on that in this country--okay. All right, county boundaries sometimes stayed the same, but the county seat would change. Now why would this be? A booming mine town will sharply decline when the mines play out. A county seat, if it's bypassed by a new railroad, won't last long, because transportation and communication were everything back then. Gerrymandering and other political funny business is not a new concept, just so you know; there was plenty of it back then. And also sometimes there were natural disasters--flood, fire, or storm--that just wiped out a town and made it a place that they realized it wasn't a good place to rebuild, so they would have the county seat go somewhere else. So why does this even matter? The county seat is where the county courthouse is located. And what's in the county courthouse? The records we want to get our hands on. So that's why we need to keep track of these county courthouses. There are several counties in the United States that have two county seats. So you need to do a little background on your particular county so you know what you're dealing with so you don't miss things. Here's an example from my own research life. Indianola, which was called the Queen City of the West--it had such a booming future, they thought--was the county seat of Calhoun County, Texas. It was a great port city in Matagorda Bay, if you know where that is, on the coast of Texas. And it was a pretty good rival to Galveston, which at that time was the greatest port city in Texas. Houston really hadn't come to its own yet. In 1875 a major hurricane rode through this area and destroyed much of Indianola. The townsfolk recovered and rebuilt, however. In 1886 an even bigger hurricane hit and destroyed most of the town and started the fires that destroyed the rest. At least 150 people were killed and probably more, which was a good chunk of a small town. Texas was not majorly populated at the time. This is the original Calhoun County courthouse that was there in Indianola. This is the ruins of that courthouse, and you can see Matagorda Bay in the background. That was what was left after the storms. And today the coastline has receded a bit more. And in this aerial photo, that little black square that you see in the green is the courthouse ruins in Matagorda Bay. So if they hadn't moved it already, they would have had to move it recently. So they moved the county seat further back from the ocean, in Port Lavaca. Responsibilities sometimes changed. For example, in Utah, pre-1898, unfortunately, there were no government requirements to actually keep birth records. Between 1898 and 1905 county clerks were assigned this responsibility. In 1905 the Utah Department of Health assumed this responsibility, as they felt the county clerks were not being thorough. So why is it important to know this? This is how records are identified and stored in the state archives--is by the governmental entity that kept the records or was responsible to see that they were kept. So knowing that this happened--there really are two sets if you look in the archive records on this, Utah State Archives website. So this example is also a reminder that not all records that were kept were supposed to be--and I can verify that's true--nore were they kept properly even when they were kept. Okay, sometimes boundaries change when territories became states. When Iowa--when the State of Iowa was formed in 1846, 20 counties that were created by Wisconsin territory were included and the names retained. Also, 2 counties that were created by Michigan territory, then given to Wisconsin territory, then given to Iowa were included. So all 22 of these actually retained their names, but they changed territories at least once before landing in a state. This happened a lot in the areas where these territories would start out large and they would cut them down as they peeled states off, so there can be a lot of jurisdictions involved. Let's talk about towns, counties, and cities incurring name changes. Some possible reasons: Sometimes it was to eliminate confusion. In 1840 the U.S. Postal Service decreed that there be only one post office of a given name in any state. There was, however, no rule about how many cities or towns in a state could have the same name. So when these towns were about to be incorporated and they realized they could not have the post office named the same name, they oftentimes changed the name of the town. I found this so many times in my research. They changed the town so that they could do something that was unique, that they could have the town and the post office with that name. Sometimes these changes were made to gain political favor. Maybe somebody was trying to butter up a local politician for some reason or other. Maybe it was to honor somebody or to eliminate a name that had become an embarrassment--that happened, okay--or because a new entity was formed by division or annexation. Here's a few examples of some city name changes. Who knew that Boston had been named Shawmut before? There was a Germantown, Nebraska, that was quickly renamed after one of the local men was killed in World War I by German troops. That happened a lot during World War I and World War II, that Germanic names changed. Germanic towns changed their names, and sometimes they changed back after the war, but it was just something that was a problem sometimes. Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco after California became a U.S. territory. Here we see a picture of the first settler of a spot in central Florida. This first settler, not surprisingly, named the settlement after himself. His name was Aaron Jernigan--that's how he pronounced it. Jernigan, however, became a career scoundrel and eventual fugitive from the law. So while he was hiding out in Texas, his town was renamed Orlando.

Eventually, the Florida folks realized they also needed to change the name of this county.

[LAUGHTER] You like that? Okay.

Orange sounded good.

I can't picture Disneyland being a success in Jernigan, Mosquito, Florida, can you? [LAUGHTER]

Let's talk about this list of possible anomalies. There are cities located in more than one county or township. There are independent cities, cities that are no longer under the jurisdiction of a county. There are consolidated city-county governments, where the county and the city share responsibilities. There are areas that were U.S. territory that no longer are, such as the Panama Canal Zone. And there is noncontiguous territory, and I have links for all these different cases, or resources about them, that you can go and see more of in the syllabus material. Here is Dallas, Texas. Notice that it has land in five different counties: Denton, Collin, Rockwall, Kaufman, and Dallas. On the way to becoming this sprawling metropolis, Dallas engulfed and annexed several other places, as you might imagine, including a freedmen's town called Alpha and the towns of Oasis; East Dallas; Cedar Springs; Oak Cliff; Renner, which had already taken over Frankfurt as well; and many more. If you notice that little green oval that's just above where it says "City of Dallas," there right in the middle of things, it's comprised of two small cities--Highland Park and University Park--that are completely surrounded by Dallas but not part of it. This creates what is known as an enclave, and it's called the Park Cities enclave because they both have park in their name. So an enclave is a jurisdiction completely surrounded by another jurisdiction. Even little cities can straddle county and township lines. Where that little arrow is pointing, to the dot on the borderline there, is Chesterfield, Indiana, population 2,500. It's half in Union Township, Madison County, and half in Salem Township in Delaware County. So when you think about this, folks may have moved across town for lower rent or better school or whatever--you know?--more property, and crossed county and township boundary lines.

Or they might have owned a business on one side of town and lived on the other side, and can you imagine keeping track of all that tax and land record stuff? Okay. So over time, ancestors who never left the city may turn up in multiple jurisdictions, so you really need to do your homework on your ancestors. I had a family that was lived in a town that was on a state border, and there was two towns on either side sort of named the same thing, and it took me a minute to catch up to what was actually going on there. The syllabus contains a link to a list of cities in multiple counties, so that's kind of interesting to look at. As far as independent cities in the United States, there's 41 so far; 38 of those are in Virginia. They had a constitutional change that caused this to happen, actually. And the other three are--the very first one, which was the city of Baltimore, Maryland, which actually separated from Baltimore County in 1851, so you can see that square that's out of the map there of Baltimore County. The other two are St. Louis, Missouri, and Carson City, Nevada. So as I said before, independent cities do not answer to a county. Now, let's talk about noncontiguous territory. This is Elsie, Michigan. You can see it's made up of two portions of land, one on each side of the Maple River. Both pieces are in Duplain Township, Clinton County, Michigan. There's also half an island involved in the western portion. I don't know who had the pencil and paper and was drawing these lines, but anyway, this kind of thing happens. And speaking of Michigan, remember that the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is non-contiguous. It is attached to Wisconsin, not Lower Michigan.

There have been a lot of complications with the state boundaries on the Delmarva Peninsula. This relatively small peninsula is shared by three states: Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia.

I was researching a family there that seemed to have suddenly moved from Maryland to Delaware. It turns out a faulty map was responsible, and the mistake was never corrected. And thus Delaware remains one-third larger--if you can believe it, it could have been smaller, okay--it remains one-third larger than it might have been. This is a map showing the mistake. The powers that be in England--you know, never seen the place, right? Okay--they had decreed that the southern boundary of Delaware would begin at the shore at Cape Henlopen and meet the Mason-Dixon Line, which is the vertical line down the center of this map. The faulty map said that Cape Henlopen was here. Cape Henlopen's really there. So Delaware won all of--I think that Sussex County.

Lord Calvert of Maryland tried to complain about that, and the people in London said, "Tough. [LAUGHS] No, we're not changing that." A big problem are--have you noticed that a lot of states have really squiggly boundaries and those are really rivers? Well, that caused some really interesting issues for--because that was the state boundary, it was also the boundary of counties and so forth. So this is what's called the Kentucky Bend. It's an exclave of Fulton County, Kentucky, being a part of the county yet completely surrounded by other jurisdictions. There was a major misunderstanding by the folks in Washington, D.C., about the real path of the Mississippi River at this point. And so that caused this piece of territory to be included in Kentucky rather than in joining Tennessee, which would've made a whole lot more sense. This territory--if you'll notice that Kentucky Bend territory is on the same side of the river as what I call mainland Kentucky, okay? And the southern border is an extension of Kentucky's border. They just did not realize I guess the river dipped down like that. Now, just to show you about the issues that rivers create, this is also the Mississippi River that you see, the blue line going down the center of this. But that red line is actually the Mississippi-Arkansas border, which was designated as the Mississippi River, and that was the path of the river when those states were formed. You can see how much it has veered away from that due to floods and various occurrences over the years.

So what this means is now there are actually pieces of the state of Mississippi on the west side of the river and pieces of Arkansas on the east. And sometimes states will make a deal to simply swap land when things like this happen; sometimes they do not, and so you can imagine the difficulties created for these residents, who are kind of caught in these across-the-river situations. So that may have happened to our ancestors as well. Let's talk about some confusingly common conditions, I call them. The most common place-name in the United States is Washington; that is not surprising, I'm sure. There are 88-plus cities, towns, boroughs, and villages by that name. There are also 250 places named Washington Township in the United States, 49 of which are in Iowa.

There are five Washington Townships in New Jersey alone. No offense to anybody, but you wouldn't think New Jersey was big enough to have repeat names, but they do. George was popular. So there are 31 of the 50 states that have a Washington County. So you cannot afford to make assumptions about where your family was living. Imagine the challenges with having multiple cities, towns, and townships in a state by the same name--multiple counties, cities, and places all over the U.S. with the same name. There are many U.S. places named after foreign locations, which may be a clue to the origin of the original settlers. In the United States, there are 26-plus places named Paris, three of which are in Wisconsin. Fifteen of these are cities. Paris, Texas, is the biggest one. And you can tell that that's a picture from there.

Let's talk about just a few more confusing places. Imagine a place with three state names. There is actually a place named Wyoming, Iowa, Wisconsin. There's a King County, Washington; there's a King City, Washington, in next door Oregon. There's Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Oklahoma; there are a number of states like that, where there is a city, county, and town of the same name and they're all together like that. There's Mississippi, Missouri. and Mississippi, Arkansas. There's Delaware, New Castle, Delaware; Delaware, Delaware, Ohio, where I have family; and just for fun, a place named after two countries: Mexico, Peru, Indiana. I just love to read up on the origins of these names because it's a great curiosity. And so you can imagine what might happen if your family and location wasn't completely written down, if it was just a piece of it and you jumped to some conclusion. Oh, and did I mention that Charles City and James City are really counties in Virginia? Okay. So there are also 22 same-name counties that are side by side in the United States. How is this possible? Well, these counties are side by side, but they're across state boundaries from each other. That just shows you what kind of confusion might have occurred. So for example, Big Horn County, Montana, is actually back to back with Big Horn County, Wyoming. Sometimes this is because there's a river or a feature, mountain feature, that runs through and they both want to use the name. So imagine the potential confusion here. These are all the 11 pairs of those names. This is Vermilion County, Illinois, which is one of those. It has eight neighboring counties. Excuse me a second.

All right. It has eight neighboring counties; five are in Illinois.

Excuse me. Five are in Illinois, and three are in Indiana, including the other Vermilion County. It's right down in the far corner there.

All right, so this is San Juan County, Utah. This is the county in the United States with the most neighbor counties--14. Five are in Utah, five are in Colorado, one is in New Mexico--catty-corner, that's the other San Juan--and three in Arizona. And that's the famous Four Corners; you probably recognize that there.

These neighbor counties are important because they're important places to check for marriages, burials, the bride or groom's family. If there wasn't, say, the type of church that they wanted in their area, they would just cross over to the next county and find one. So these are important places to look for previous residences for your family, the bride or the groom's family in a marriage, that sort of thing. Keep the neighbors in mind. And half the time, you know, counties are formed by cutting off a chunk of one of the neighbor counties, so that's another thing to keep track of. Then we also have places that no longer exist. We have ghost towns. You know, typically there's a few buildings left, but nobody lives there. There are flooded towns, and the definition of those is towns that were purposely inundated for dam and reservoir construction. Other eminent domain situations exist. My husband's grandparents, my grandparents and great grandparents--all were forced to move due to highway construction. I'm sure there's examples of that in many of our families. There are lost towns, towns that were lost to river flooding, fire, mining disaster, toxic waste issues that makes them uninhabitable now, and storms, islands and coastlines that wear away, such as what is happening in the Chesapeake Bay, the Outer Banks, and barrier islands of the East and Gulf Coast.

As an example of one of these, I was researching in Henry County, Missouri. I found the same members of a family I was researching listed as having been buried in two different cemeteries. And it was true. Truman Dam construction was going to form Truman Lake. The cemeteries were moved. Ironically, these folks were from Deep Creek Township. [LAUGHTER]

The big question with lost towns is, where are the records now? You want to check the county courthouse of any county that that town was in during its lifespan. Check the district court records, check with county historical or the genealogical society in the area, local libraries, local historians. Look for newspapers that were being published during the time period that it exists; there will be references there. And the cemetery may still be there.

Records typically stay in the jurisdiction where they were created unless that jurisdiction doesn't exist anymore, unless records had been transferred to the state archives or other location for storage--and this has happened, the case where records were stolen, lost, or destroyed. There is one other case. Some records may have been the victim of what I call official decisions and government record-retention schedules, meaning some records were kept for only so many years and then destroyed. I'm hoping with the advent of all this scanning and keeping records on computer that that never has to happen anymore, because whenever I hear stories of, oh yeah, we had that record but we tossed it, burned it, whatever--ugh, isn't that a horrible feeling as a genealogist? This is the original Utah Territory, with the white shape in the center being the eventual state. So you can see how much other territory and how many other states were involved.

At the Utah State Archive website, where I found those other charts, I located a chart listing the extinct counties of Utah, including the formation and dissolution dates and where that land ended up, whether in another county in Utah or another state. And there were 10 of these. And this was on the accompanying chart. It was the district court records for the extinct counties of Utah. There were only three court districts--remember, we wound up with eight--but there were only three court districts by the time the last of these 10 was gone. Even so, 8 of these 10 counties were in two different court districts in their short lifespan. So that would be critical to know if your ancestors lived in one of those locations. Let's talk about proximity and preference. Did your ancestors go to their own courthouse or maybe one that was more convenient? Once again, those politicians in Washington with a map and a pencil may not have understood--it was probably not a topographical map, you see--they may not have known of or considered the geographic impediments that were involved in the areas they were drawing in and creating jurisdictions.

So what I meant by that was it may be closer due to a river that's running through there or a mountain range or something. If your ancestors needed a marriage license, it might have been easier for them to slip to the next county to that county courthouse to get one. So that's why you want to keep track of those neighboring counties. Some folks travel great distances to have ceremonies performed in their preferred church. My ancestors were that way in Texas; they often traveled at great length to come back so Gillespie County to have baptisms and marriages performed in St. Mary's Catholic Church in Fredericksburg. And interestingly enough, there were not a lot of Catholic churches farther north in Texas at that point, so they had moved north but came back for that. So our goal is to determine all these potential jurisdictions that we can search and hopefully find more records. So let's talk about some more of these names for jurisdictions and what they actually mean. And you're going to be--your goal is to make a master list of all these potential jurisdictions where your ancestor lived, worked, or owned property. So some of the possible jurisdictions that you might see are municipality, village, hamlet, city, maybe a town or a township--those are two completely different things--a county. There are Indian reservations and agencies that are independent. There are military installations and maritime and territorial jurisdictions. So what's the difference between a village, a borough, a municipality, and a city? It varies by state, but some of the factors involved are population; the structure of government, including legislative powers, taxing authority, and services provided; and whether or not that locality is incorporated. So learning jurisdictional terminology for the specific state and county where you're researching is a must.

We're going to talk about township. There are three meanings to that word as far as geographically in the United States. The two most significant are the survey township, and that's what you're seeing pictures of here. This is used in surveying land in the U.S. for the purpose of describing parcels for mapping deeds and grants. And you can see the size there; they're always the same size, the same dimensions.

The second is a civil township, which is an actual unit of local government. This system--and they occur in the states where you see the initials I have listed up there, so not in every state, but those states. This system works especially well, I think, in rural settings, where folks don't live in a city. They still live in a township, which is a record-keeping entity. So note that you will have to find the right kind of map because not every map will show the townships that are inside of a county, but you can Google that up.

So let's see. All right. Counties are crucial; they really are. They are the most important jurisdictional level overall in historical U.S. record keeping. The phrase in geographic documents is usually "counties" or "county equivalents." In Louisiana, "parish" is the county equivalent, and in Alaska, the term is "borough." The rest use "county." So there are many types of records kept at the county level, including--and there's a few of them--court, land and property, tax, voting, naturalization, military separation, divorce, birth, and you can see the marriage and death records, and notice that there's more than one kind. Sometimes we say, "I've got the marriage record." Well, you may have one of them, but if you only have one piece of paper, you don't have all of them, so be sure and look and see what was kept in that area to see what else you might be able to get. They have different information on them. Census is crucial because it places a family in a specific county at a specific year. On this particular 1870 census, which I put the blank of the census headings above, we find four places that describe where my family lives: the state of California, the county of Tehama, the township of Paskenta, and the post office is listed as being at Red Bluff. Now, Red Bluff is actually a cluster of people, you know, a little village.

That post office, additional post office part, points you to to--it helps you focus your search. Red Bluff was not actually incorporated until 1876; thereafter, it could be used as a census division. This is a clip from the "Index of U.S. Counties," which is a Wikipedia article containing a marvelous list of counties and county equivalents of the United States and all of the current ones. They're in alphabetical order. And this allows you to see if there is more than one county of a given name. There are four Adair, or Adiar, counties, depending on how you pronounce it. If your ancestors are not in Adair County, Iowa, as you thought, you can see from this list that you have at least three more choices to search. You also need to check a list I'll show you in a minute. So this is super helpful, and you can see those are live links that you can just click on them, go to the county, and get the information on when it was formed and all of that. Points to remember: When a new county was formed, they did not carve up the county record books. They could not do that. So you need to look for records under the county jurisdiction that was in effect at the time the event was being researched. And we need to investigate the history of the areas where your family lived. Follow the boundary and name changes. Ancestors are really confusing. I found that they often list their birthplace according to the jurisdictions that were in effect in their later years, maybe don't even know about all of the changes that occurred when they were kids. So don't be misled. Be sure to double-check that county formation date that they've listed and do your homework tracing backwards to the apparent counties and so forth, if necessary. All right. Counties maybe formed--this is a really critical thing--counties may be formed or designated but not yet organized. What does that mean? Counties in this situation will generally be attached--that's the legal word--to a parent or other neighboring county that is already organized. So a county formation document might say something like, "Smith County is being attached to Jones County for all civil and criminal jurisprudence." And so in plain English, what they're saying is for taxation, because they're not going to let you get out of being taxed, even if your county is not organized, voting, land and court cases, marriages, etc.--so this means that that other county would be keeping the records for this county until they got staffed and up and running. So what does this mean? Well, for our purposes, it means you have another place to check for records.

Why counties may no longer exist: Some counties were renamed but retained their exact territory. So they're there; you just don't know. Number 2: some counties retain their names but ended up in another state or territory. Some county names were lost when the county was divided into two or more counties and the original name was not retained by any of them. And some county lands were divided between other extant counties. Some counties lost enough land or population to become unnecessary or nonfunctional when territories were formed or divided. Many counties were proclaimed or authorized but never organized due to a lack of actual settlement, and that's what happened with many of the extinct counties of Utah. And some counties were begun without proper legal authority--imagine that--and later declared unconstitutional. For example--and these situations are ongoing; don't think it was all over a hundred years ago. In 1979, for example, Washabaugh County, South Dakota, was combined into Jackson County, and that name disappeared. In 1981 Cibola County, New Mexico, was created from a part of Valencia County, and so it's happening all the time.

So this is the other list I was talking about, the Wikipedia "List of Former U.S. Counties," super helpful list. This list is organized by state and tells not only which counties are gone but why. If it was just a name change, they'll tell you that, if, you know, whatever it was. It would be very brief, but they'll tell you. Okay, some suggestions I'd like to make for research purposes: Google fill in the blank from your favorite county courthouse. Why? In telling the story of the courthouse, I have found that any disasters will likely be mentioned, as will as what happened to the courthouse contents. And that's what we really care about, right? You may learn if there was ever a fire, a flood, a storm, or other event that affected record availability today. Another Google search I recommend is to Google, and then once again fill in your county of choice, boundary changes. It's crucial to know about county formation and the boundary changes. Was it your ancestors who moved, or was it the county boundary that moved? Some of my mother's ancestors lived in the little town or Watervliet, New York. The next thing we knew, they were listing themselves in Albany, and so they had moved--or had they? A careful examination that I did at a university library that had a mega collection of maps every few years of that area--I figured out that Albany had expanded and taken them in. They actually hadn't moved. So you are probably going to need to organize your findings. I like spreadsheets. You can just create a simple spreadsheet. And I like them because their rows can expand to hold as much information as you need to have them and you can have as many columns as you want. You can see here I put in name, date, event, location, possible jurisdictions, there, because you pinpoint the location but then you have to figure out, oh, the jurisdiction that--so that spot was in over the course of the time period where you're researching. And then I always like to include a check box at the end because you've got to check it off so you know what you've done and haven't done yet. So you want to use every available event date to help you pinpoint the correct jurisdictions in which to search.

Let's talk about locating historical geographical resources. We need to be able to locate these types of things, not just modern ones but historical stuff. Let's start with maps. We're going to look at one of my favorite websites, and that's mapofus.org. And you can see below--had to kind of clip this page together to get it up in one shot so you could see it--but you'll see that list of all the states there, and you can choose whatever one you're after. I chose Illinois. This is the main maps page. And as you scroll down, there's just all kinds of goodies here, things you can click on. The one I want to show you first is the interactive map of Illinois county formation history. These are animated maps showing you how the counties changed. If you click the first, the Play button up there--I know it's awful small, but it's where the red arrow is pointing--if you do that, if you click, the presentation will start and show you an animated view of Illinois county development beginning in 1790. This would all work the same, whatever state you're on. The second arrow is pointing toward a list of years when counties were formed in Illinois. They are not showing you a map for every single year but the years that they had to remake maps because boundaries had changed, so that's why they're--they look like sort of a random bunch of dates, but they're not. All right, so click on any one of those. You can do that and see what the counties looked like at that point in time when your ancestor might have been there. The next red arrow is pointing to a set of Illinois census year maps overlaid on a modern map of the counties. And below that, in all the blue things you see below that, are the abbreviations for the counties that are used on the maps and links to those counties. So why is that significant? Let's look at northern Illinois, where my mother's ancestors were, to answer that question. And here we are in 1835. And you can see at that point that green stuff up at the top is unorganized territory. You can see that Cook County--that's Chicago, basically--went clear to the Wisconsin border, and there's only one other larger county towards the other end.

By 1836 Cook County had been reduced in size. You can see McHenry, the one that was formed kind of above it and from a piece of the unorganized territory, which is one of my ancestor counties there. Next to McHenry, Winnebago has been formed as well. So we've eliminated all that unorganized territory. By 1839, and notice this isn't a very long span of time, but by 1839 the counties along the Wisconsin border have been further subdivided and now include three more, which are Stephenson, Boone, and Lake Counties. Cook has been divided to form DuPage; Kane has been divided to form DeKalb. So Mom's ancestors could have lived in three different counties without moving and six without really trying. [LAUGHS] So that's why you have to map these things and keep track of what's going on. I had wondered why they were moving around so much. They weren't, really. All right, one of the other best places you can go for this kind of reference material is called the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, and it's located at the website of the Newberry Library in Chicago. All you have to do is just Google this, Atlas of Historical County Boundaries; this is all on your syllabus. They also have an animated county boundary map series which is similar to the one we saw at mapsofus.org--they have a lot more. I clicked on--I decided to choose Idaho, and you can see all the blue lines there are hot links to different collections of information that you can study about Idaho. Perhaps the most important section is the individual county chronologies. These charts and lists will give you the story of the creation of the county and the history of all territory lost or gained, name changes, etc. Many other types of information may be found at this site. And further down this list of options are instructions for downloading the material, all the material for a given state, in a PDF format or downloading information in shapefiles or as KMZ files.

So those are very useful files that you can use with Google Earth and Google Maps.

I selected Bannock County as an example. And we're now we're looking at that county chronology section, so it tells me up here the exact date that Bannock was created from Bingham. Right there I learned the parent county that, if they were there before 1893, that I need to look for. In 1918 Bannock lost some county to Franklin County. In 1919 Bannock lost to the creation of Caribou County. In 1927 Bannock gained from Oneida and exchanged with Power County. And what that means is there may have been somebody who owned a big ranch area who had land on both sides of the boundary, and it was getting tricky for just all of the governmental reasons to have that be half in one county and half in another. So sometimes the counties would just switch land and, you know, as they were straightening out these things that went along with the formation of new counties and so on. So that's the kind of type of information you will find, really super helpful. And for each of the states, there is a bibliography and list of sources. This is the first part of the Idaho bibliography. And if you--trust me that this Newberry Library is a total quality class act. So the sources that they use to put this together would no doubt be the best sources there are, so a good place if you want to look at something specifically. Here, this is the Map Guide to the U.S. Federal Census, all U.S. county boundaries, 1790 to 1920. This is a printed source that you'll find valuable. A lot of times it's a reference book in public libraries, family history centers, or, as I like to say, anywhere where genealogy is done. And there's a map for every year a federal census was taken in a given state or territory. In this example that you see here, that's the 1820 census county boundaries in black. They're overlaid on a gray map, and the white boundaries you see on the gray map are what it would look like in 1920. So it kind of gives you the idea of where it's going, and I find these really helpful. And that's--I started showing you several ways to find the same kind of information, so wherever you might be, you have different ways to find it. Okay. How do you locate places that used to exist? Well, what you need is a historical gazetteer. A gazetteer is a listing of places and details about the--not a collection of maps; that is an atlas. So there are several types of gazetteers that exist. Some only have populated places; some have geographical features, including mountains, lakes, rivers, and much more. So another research suggestion here is to Google fill-in-the-blank state or county historical gazetteer. I did that. I just plugged in Vermont to see what would happen, and I found that there is a wonderfully thorough five-volume set that was done in the 1800s. And this thing has been scanned and indexed in a couple of different ways, and now virtually every word is searchable. So what a great result from a five-second search tool, located that. This is the U.S. Geographical Survey, or it's called USGS, and it oversees several projects, and one of them is the Geographical Names Information System, or GNIS. The GNIS is our nation's official repository of domestic geographic-feature names information. So it was getting so complicated when the West started to be developed that they just formed a government agency about 1890 to keep track of all of these names and name changes that were going on. This is the USGS home site. You can see there's a search window there, and I put in "Blue Diamond," which is this little company mining town that my father actually grew up in, in Nevada. So let's see. Here is the first part of the hit list that I got. And you can see that the first place is the populated place, Blue Diamond. The next place is--they're showing you that's also a place that's designated as a census-designated place for the government. Blue Diamond Elementary School--when my dad went to that school, it was a one-room schoolhouse. Blue Diamond Hill and Mill--the hill, mill, and the mine, that's why they were there; my grandfather worked at the mine. And the Blue Diamond Park and the Blue Diamond Post Office it also lists. So all different kinds of things. And it shows that they're all in Clark County, which won't always be the case with a search you do. This is the rest of that hit list: latitude and longitude and elevation. And then where it says "Map," there--this system is key to the government's topo map set, the U.S. topo maps where--and so this would be the key as to which name those different features were listed on. In this case, all the features were located in the same county, but that's not always the case. And these are the types of features, believe it or not, that are cataloged into this GNIS system. So you can see there that there's a lot of things that might be helpful for genealogists, such as cemeteries and churches and just--you know how your ancestors, sometimes in the written remembrances of them, they'll still mention some river that they're nearby or some hill or mountain or some other feature like that? And so this would be a way of pinning those down. WorldCat is the world's largest library catalog. It's a consortium of over 10,000 libraries. And you can use WordCat to locate titles, authors, keywords, such as "location," to identify more resources and institutions with holdings. This is the database librarians use when they're doing an interlibrary loan search. Things that are cataloged in here are books, periodicals, newspapers, articles, DVDs, CDs, not a whole lot of manuscripts--some. So you don't want to look at archive good for those. So here's an example of a search in there. My search terms are "county," "boundary maps," and "Virginia." And this is one of the hits: "Atlas of county boundary changes from 1634 to 1895." Does that sound like a winner? Wow. So now what? What do I do with that knowledge? Well, if you scroll down the page, it actually has a list of the institutions with holdings, and because your computer knows where you are, it lists them in the order of how close they are to your house. So you can look through that list of hits, and if one is close by, you can hop in the car and go see it. If it's far, you can make an interlibrary loan order, whichever library you use to do that. And if all else fails, WorldCat supplies a link for the website of the owner institutions for all of these things, and so you could contact them and find out how you could make your own arrangements for page copies or whatever you needed. This is the Internet Archive, and I'm telling you this is a total treasure trove. It's expanding into other areas, but at this point it's primarily an internet storage site for materials that are no longer under copyright, and this year that date is 1923, anything before 1923. And so anything that's on there from that time frame can be downloaded, actually. And so I've been able to snag copies of a lot of out-of-print books, gazetteers, county histories, that kind of thing.

So here I did a search for the "Gazetteer of the United States," and you can see how many different years I got one for. You click on it; it just pops right up, ready to download. And then I clipped this part from another part of the page showing you the choices of files that--sometimes there are even more choices than this. And once you download these files, they're every-word searchable via the control finder, the Find function.

Okay, locating historical materials regarding jurisdictions: You really need to--the United States may be the most challenging research location in the world because we have 50 states plus territories and District of Columbia, and every one of those does things a little differently. So we do need to get with the government terminology, figure out what the court structure is like, how that works, boundary changes that happened, the dates when records began and end. And you'll need to locate county histories, which generally contain details of the development of county government, townships, cities and towns, early residents, and all that sort of thing. Remember to use WorldCat internet archives, FamilySearch books, for those kind of things. This is the state archive. Well, they're a gold mine, and the state archive is the number one place to find out the details about state and county records and government. Many of them are digitizing and posting searchable record collections. This is the home page of CoSA, the Council of State Archivists. The state will supply information for all the state archives in the United States, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories. And this includes the URL for the archive and email and phone contact for archivists. This is another page at Genealogy Trails. All these are in your handout. It gives you a link to not only state archives but to state libraries and state historical societies. And there's more ideas here for Googling--regional county and local libraries, historical and genealogical societies, university libraries, county record repositories. And then sometimes a Google search is the fastest way to find things that are in these other places, so sometimes I just start with that and see what happens. These two are great reference books; you've probably run into them: The Handy Book for Genealogists and Ancestry's Red Book. They will give you a list of all the counties and when they were formed and whether they were formed from original territory or pieces of others, give you a basic history of each state, and including when the civil records for each county starts. And one more thought is that records may not be archived near the point of origin. They could be anywhere. Sometimes a university or other entity will house a collection that spans multiple states because the focus is on a particular religion or ethnic group. If you were wanting to do Quaker research, for example, the Quaker collection resides at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, in the Friends Historical Library there. And the Germans from Russia Collection is located at North Dakota State University at Fargo. You can also look for things through archive or that way. So you just need to determine where the records you seek can be searched, ordered, or viewed. Figure out what records were originally kept, because there is no point of looking for things that never existed or still don't. Who kept them? Was it a person, an organization, or a government entity? Why? What was their purpose? And therefore, what are their contents? What records have survived? And where are they now? Are they online? Have they been index, scanned, digitized, filmed, or published? So I just want you to remember that assumptions are the termites of genealogy. Don't assume--figure out the when's and where's, and locate all the jurisdictions where your ancestors lived. Why? So you can find more records. Thanks. [APPLAUSE]