RLP 186: Revisiting Locality Research Again

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 186, Revisiting Locality Research Again. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.

Nicole (43s):
Hello everybody. Welcome to Research Like a Pro today.

Diana (47s):
Hi, Nicole, and hi to our listeners. We’re excited to be back with our revisiting the Research Like a Pro series of podcasts. And today we’re going to talk all about locality research. So enjoy this episode about my Nancy Brisco project and how I chose localities to do a guide for, I know that’s a big question for everyone because we have so many localities in our research. How do we know which one we should do a guide for? So enjoy the episode and we’ll be back at the end to give some insights and thoughts. Okay.

Nicole (1m 24s):
See you at the other end.

Diana (1m 27s):
So let’s dive into our subject of the day, which is revisiting locality research. We also are trying to address some of the common questions that we see in our study groups and the e-course and people emailing us or in the Facebook group about the process. And we have had several of the same types of questions that we’ll talk a little bit about today. One of those is, should I do both a county and the state guide? So obviously that would be for maybe United States researcher, even in England, you know, do you want to go local? Do you want to go bigger? Another question is how detailed should my guide be?

Diana (2m 7s):
And I maybe would add how many hours should I be spending on this guide? And then the other question that we often get is what if I have multiple places that I discovered from my timeline analysis that correlate to my objective, should I do a guide for all of those places? So Nicole, any thoughts on any of those questions?

Nicole (2m 32s):
Absolutely. So, yes, I think you should do a local level guide, whether the local level for you as a township or a county or a parish, and then also learn about the broader jurisdictions and understand what national records are available and intermediate jurisdiction levels. So yes, the more guides that you can do the better, sometimes you can find published guides that will work. You don’t need to make your own, but often it’s the best idea to compile all the information that you can find on a jurisdiction into one quick guide, whether it’s a link to a few different record collections and the list of books that you’ve found that are useful or something much longer, if you have multiple places that go along with your objective, then yes, you’re going to want to understand each of them.

Nicole (3m 21s):
And in order to do a reasonably exhaustive research, you need to understand the historical and legal and geographical context that goes along with each of the places that your ancestor lived. If your objective is pretty specific, maybe there will only be one location that you need to focus in on. But if you’re trying to find biographical details that span a person’s life and they moved around, then yes, you’re probably going to have more than one location. Tell us what you did and the Nancy Briscoe project.

Diana (3m 51s):
Okay. So let me read my objective to review that with everyone. The objective for this project is to discover more about the life of Nancy E Briscoe born seven, February, 1847 in Benton county, Arkansas Nancy, married, Richard Frazier about 1865 in Missouri and died 30 January, 1924 in love county, Oklahoma. So I have identified a time period. I want to discover more about her life and I didn’t refine it in that objective. But as I did the summary of known facts, I realized I wanted to focus on her life before her marriage or the early years of her marriage. So basically the time she was in Arkansas and McDonald county, Missouri.

Diana (4m 35s):
So I discovered as I was doing the summary of known facts, that I did have a few different places and I had Barry county, Missouri, and then I had Benton county, Arkansas. And, you know, you wish that sometimes you could only do one locality guide, but I realized I really needed to look at both of those because the family seemed to be moving back and forth. And when I looked at a map, those two counties are right on the border of Missouri and Arkansas. And so I obviously needed to know both counties. Now, the counties I did not worry about were the ones in Texas and the ones in Indian territory slash Oklahoma, because those were later in life and this objective was not going to focus on those.

Diana (5m 23s):
I luckily had a really nice Arkansas state guide created from my accreditation preparation. So I knew I could use that. And I decided that I, at this time, wouldn’t worry about doing a big Missouri state guide because the time in Missouri was just very limited, it was probably less than 10 years. And so I decided if I needed to do anything with that, I would just use some of the online Missouri state guides, like the FamilySearch Wiki to help me with any records they are. But another time I do have other ancestors in Missouri. And so I would love to make a really good state guide for Missouri. You just have to decide how much time you have for a project and what you really want to dive into and do at that particular point in time.

Nicole (6m 10s):
Great. So when we create a locality guide, we have a set grouping of sections that we use to help us remember what to include. So we’re going to go through that and talk about some of the background information we like to include in the locality guide. And then also what types of records we like to include because we include links to record collections around the web and at other repositories that we will want to check. So usually in the locality guide, we start with creating just a list of quick facts about that place. So the capital, the dates that the county was formed, or if it’s a parish, it will also have the dates that the parish was formed.

Nicole (6m 53s):
And you want to find that out, you can talk about the date, the state was formed. If you’re doing a state guide, if you’re doing a United States state guide, then you can talk about what type of land it is. Just put it at the top as a quick reference that this is a state land state or a federal land state, so that you’ll know where and how to look for land records. And another thing to put in quick facts is when the registration of vital records began. So when birth records began with death records began just some quick facts that can help you,

Diana (7m 29s):
Right? That’s a great section. And I love having that right at the top of my guide. After that, I like to have links to online research guides. We don’t really have to recreate the wheel. We can link to other really good guides. And I always do a guide to the family search research Wiki for whatever locality is, but there’s some other good state guides as well, or county guides or locality guides online. And one of those is a family history guide, and it has links for all sorts of things for so many different localities. So if you haven’t checked that out, I would highly recommend looking at that as well. And putting a link to that into your locality guide.

Diana (8m 11s):
And sometimes I will just do a Google search for my locality. Like I would do something like Missouri genealogy, and you never know what you might find with some online collection of records that might have been done by a state archives or by just a person interested in that state. You know, sometimes it’s fun just to throw it out there and see what you can find, but I for sure would always do the FamilySearch research Wiki and the family history guides. Another great one to link to.

Nicole (8m 41s):
Yes, I noticed in your Arkansas locality guide that you have linked to the FamilySearch catalog page for Arkansas, Cyndi’s list for Arkansas, Ancestry’s data collections for Arkansas, LinkPendium, MyHeritage, all these different pages where the focus is on Arkansas research, the US GEN web’s Arkansas archives page. So it’s really just a wonderful list of links to websites that have information about researching in Arkansas. I like to think of the locality guide more as a kind of a table of contents or a list of resources that I can use, and the less of original writing that I’m doing myself.

Nicole (9m 25s):
It’s just kind of a place to keep all these wonderful resources that we’ve found so that we don’t forget about them.

Diana (9m 31s):
I agree with that. A lot of times people will say, oh, I’m just feel like I’m reinventing the wheel. You know, I’m just copying stuff from the FamilySearch Wiki or whatever, but I have found that no one place has all the information and by creating your own guide, you really do get a more comprehensive idea of what’s out there. Not to mention that when you put it together yourself, you learn so much better.

Nicole (9m 58s):
Absolutely. Especially the boundary changes and what records are available to search and like record loss and that kind of thing, which are such important parts of making your research plan. Well after listing all the online research guides, then the next section we usually do is geography and maps. I love this section because as you learn about the boundary changes and the neighboring counties and towns, you start to get a lot more ideas of where you can expand your research, too. If you’re not finding anything in the first place you look, so we’ll put links to historical Gazetteers and historical maps information about what towns are within that jurisdiction, what are the neighboring places?

Nicole (10m 38s):
And then you find a good map that really is helpful. And illustrative of something that you want to show or remind yourself of. You can piece that right into your guide. A lot of the maps you’ll find online or in the public domain, or have the creative commons license so that you can reuse it. So putting these links to maps or copying pasting the maps right into your guide can be a really useful thing. Sometimes I’ll find a lot of historical maps on the U S GEN web. And so I will just provide links to all of those different historical maps, because they’re from different dates and times, and might have different usefulness depending on the project.

Diana (11m 14s):
Yeah, I think that’s great to have links in there. And when I’m doing a specific project like this one for Nancy Brisco, where it was very specific with the counties, I like to find those maps that I can copy and paste and put right into my locality guide so I can keep going back to it and visualizing it. And there are so many great maps that are on the library of Congress and David Rumsey. His website has a lot of great ones, and I love the historical ones that are just about the time period, because often they will show those little tiny places that are exactly where you’re researching and you can get such a good view and a real vision of what your ancestor was doing.

Diana (11m 56s):
So I highly encourage everyone to spend a little time in the maps. You maybe just want to pick one or two that are the best representation at the time period. You are researching and put that into your locality guide. And also, I just want to mention that sometimes when I am a little bit strapped for time, and I don’t want to make a full on locality guide that I will do as part of the locality section in my research project document, I will just put little snippets of the information right there for the specific things. So for instance, with the Nancy Briscoe project, I have got some background information from the family search Wiki about those dates for county records that Nicole mentioned, I have that the courthouse burned in 1861, which is always really good to know, and I have some apps.

Diana (12m 48s):
So I put some just really pertinent details to my project right there within my research project document. So that’s another tip that can be helpful as you’re trying to put together your project and doing a specific research objective. Okay, let’s talk about the timeline. So in your locality guide, there is a section for timeline of major events. This is where you want to do a little bit of research, especially if this is an area you’re going to be really working in. Maybe you’ve got so many family lines that are centered in New York or Pennsylvania or Michigan, you know, an area that maybe you didn’t grow up in.

Diana (13m 32s):
You don’t remember the history or never really knew much about the history. This is a good chance to really go a little bit deeper into that history and create a timeline. Often I can find really good timelines online that other people have created, and I can take the bits and pieces from those that I want to use. I try to just think of the events that would be most applicable to my genealogy research. And some of those would be things like maybe major government changes, wars. It’s always good to know what military events might have happened, that your ancestor would be involved in maybe migration. You know, there’s just a lot of different things you can think of when you’re doing your timeline, but after you’ve learned about it, then you can just really quickly review that and get a good idea of what was happening.

Diana (14m 21s):
So when I did my Arkansas state guide, I actually had that be pretty involved because I was using this for my accreditation background information. And Arkansas is one of those states that went through a few different possessions. First, there were the French, and then there were the Spanish, and I want it to be really clear on my time periods and how everything happened within the U S territorial period. So I just wrote little paragraphs and actually made my own history timeline. They are so I could easily review everything that I had learned. And so if you are preparing for accreditation and I know a lot of you listening are thinking of that, that’s a really good thing to do.

Diana (15m 4s):
And if you just have a confusing area, you might want to do a little bit more with the timeline and the history.

Nicole (15m 10s):
That’s great. You know, the first time that I made it a locality guide, it was for the state of Virginia and as a person who studied history at my undergraduate degree, I got a little bit bogged down in the timeline and the history section of the locality guidance spent a lot of time really studying it. And I finally realized that I didn’t need to write a history book about this. So I moved on. It is fun to study the history, but I think it’s good to do kind of a brief overview and not get too bogged down. Maybe I’m the only one that does that. One thing you could do is link to timelines that are out there already on the web. Then for the next section, after the timeline of major events, where you put in information about the history of the area and the history of the settlement, you can put in links to historical articles and books about the locality’s history, and maybe just put in some of the major periods and military engagements so that you’re not spending too long here.

Nicole (16m 9s):
Of course, the more that you know about the place and the time, you know what the better, but if you do need to spend more time researching that you can always put that into your research plan. So in your locality guide, I would suggest just kind of gathering resources and putting them there for future reference.

Diana (16m 26s):
I’m really glad you said that, that you can put that into your research plan, because that’s exactly what I did for my Nancy Brisco project. I had number one as my prioritized strategy to search county histories, to find out about those Missouri counties during the civil war era. So I just chose to make that be part of my research plan. So that I’m glad you mentioned that you can really expand and use this idea of locality research differently for each project. Sometimes we will want to do something really involved in something not so involved, and that’s okay. You don’t have to do everything exactly the same way for every project or the same way as everyone else is doing it.

Diana (17m 7s):
You know, we always say, just do what works for you and, you know, locality research and this guide isn’t perfect example. So we also want to put in there a little bit about migration routes into our, out of the area. And here again, you can spend as much time as you want to learning about that. Or you can just do a link to the FamilySearch research Wiki on migration routes. I just had an entire lecture about this over the weekend for the UTA conference. And obviously there’s a lot you can talk about with migration, but you don’t have to become an expert on it for your project. You can just do some links. And then if you think it’s really going to be beneficial for your project, that maybe would be your objective to dive in and learn about the migration of your ancestor, but for your locality guide, you can do some links of the major places and call it good.

Nicole (18m 4s):
The next section is law and government. And for this section, the most important thing to do at least for a United States is to find a digitized book at either Google books, internet archive, or Geneanet, or Hathi Trust that is about the laws and statutes of that state. These are typically in the public domain and Google books has a lot of them, but it’s really important that you have a resource to be able to understand the laws that caused certain records to be created and how they work. Especially if you’re working with land records, tax records and probate and court records.

Nicole (18m 45s):
So make sure that you try to find a book that has the laws of your state. And then if you’re in a different country, you can find those as well. And I would check Geneanet for European countries, but these are just really important to help you understand the legal context of the records and the laws.

Diana (19m 3s):
This is a question we get a lot from people also is how do I find those same glad you mentioned all the different places online, because usually they are in books that are available and because they are a little bit more challenging to find, you definitely want to link to them in your locality guide. So you don’t have to do those searches again and again. So the next section is all about archives and libraries, and we all know that there’s a lot more out there than what is online. And so you’ll want to have some really good links. Every state has an archive, and there are the national archive regional archives.

Diana (19m 45s):
When my Arkansas locality guide, I’ve got the Arkansas state archives. And then I also have the Northeast Arkansas regional archives and a link to the Southwest Arkansas regional archives because they both contain information on Arkansas. And I maybe would forget that. But when I was doing my guide, I had that in here. And so now when I’m doing an Arkansas project, it helps me remember the places that I can go to find more information. And even if you just put a link to the local library, if you’re doing a county project and you’ve got a local public library, put a link there, it’ll help you to remember that there are other places you can go besides the online resources.

Nicole (20m 33s):
Great. And then next you’ll put genealogical societies and their publications so that you can be aware of resources. That way. Sometimes you’ll find that genealogies and historical societies will have their publication online, at least the older issues of it. And sometimes you can look at those online for free.

Diana (20m 54s):
Right? I love those. In fact, I just joined the Georgia genealogy society. So I could do the IGHR and I got my first little quarterly in the mail. It was really fun to see what they produce. And there was a really nice article on a specific record set. So it was kind of fun. I think there’s just so many more things to discover, always in genealogy. And I do love that. Well, we do want to mention next in our guide, any record loss. And I mentioned already that I discovered on my Nancy Briscoe project that the courthouse burned. And of course, it’s right in the period of time that I am trying to research.

Diana (21m 34s):
There was an interesting word in that this was from the FamilySearch research, Wiki, some records were destroyed. So I think sometimes we think the courthouse burned, everything has gone, but that is not always the case. Sometimes it burned and they saved almost everything. So it’s always good to go a little bit deeper, maybe talk to someone who’s done, courthouse research there, and the boy, no more about that specific courthouse and what records might still be available. Now, I like to try to think of any substitutes. For instance, Textless were often copied and sent to this date.

Diana (22m 15s):
And so the courthouse burned and the county tax records were destroyed. You’d have a substitute on the state level. And so keep in mind that just because something was destroyed by fire or a flood or any other kind of record loss, there could be some substitutes out there. And you could make yourself a note in your locality guide of what you’ve discovered or what you have found out in your research about the locality.

Nicole (22m 41s):
Yeah, the best way that I’ve found to find what records are left after a courthouse buyer is to look at the FamilySearch catalog for typical courthouse records like land probate, and that kind of thing. For one of my burn counties, I found that there were no land records at all before 1878. So that was a pretty good clue there. And then there were some marriage bonds left, but only like 10. So for that whole period of 1790 to 1878, only 10 marriage bonds, that’s a pretty good clue that most of the marriages were lost.

Diana (23m 19s):
Oh, and isn’t it so sad when you see that we really do hate record loss, but it is part of our reality as geologists,

Nicole (23m 28s):
But it is nice to have a discussion with somebody at the courthouse who knows exactly what they have and what was lost to confirm. All right, the next section to include is local history books, where you can just list out links to county history books that are online or references to them and the family history library catalog that you might want to research when you get there. And any town histories, anything applicable from local historical articles or books,

Diana (23m 55s):
Right. And, you know, there might be some good reference books you’d want to put there. For instance, I have the North Carolina research book and I maybe would want to put just a note to myself because I have the physical book that I have that book go check that book. And I’m also getting a really nice collection of African-American research books, things that were suggested from my course at IGHR. And I am sometimes guilty of forgetting some of my resources. So if you have a collection of books, I know I have a lot of Virginia books as well that I inherited from a fellow researcher.

Diana (24m 36s):
And I sometimes forget that I have this nice collection, put that in your guide that you have got these books and make yourself some notes about how that could help with your project. It’s just a way for us to get all of this information into one place. So we don’t have to try to remember everything when we’re working in our genealogy, because we want to keep our brains free to make connections in the things we’re finding. Not try to remember all these little details about our locality. So

Nicole (25m 6s):
Now that we’ve gone through all of the background information for the locality, the next section of the locality guide will be the record collections. First, I like to put a list of general collections like Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com. There are pages specifically for a certain region. So they’ll do this for countries or for states where they just have a page that lists all of the different resources for that locality. You probably won’t find them for more local level things like a county or a town, but if you’re doing a larger region, you can use these in your locality guide,

Diana (25m 45s):
Right? And I love going straight to those catalog collections. Well next, our Bible records and compile genealogies, and this is a little bit more specific type of record, and it will be different in every locale. So you’ll want to do some Google searching. You’ll want to really poke around and see what you can find for resources. For Bible records. For my Arkansas guide, I found that there was a digitized book by FamilySearch, but it’s only available at family history centers or the family history library. So I just made myself a note and then put exactly what it was for. It’s a surname index to some 3000 family Bibles, and they came from Arkansas falls.

Diana (26m 30s):
Other states, just see what you can find. If you cannot find anything for some of these categories that we’re talking about, or maybe it’s not even applicable to the project you’re going to do. It’s totally fine to leave some of these areas blank on record types. So for instance, for my Nancy Frasier project, I didn’t think that Bible records would be very applicable for this specific little objective to discover more about her life in the 1850s and sixties. So, you know, I didn’t even worry about looking for those or having those be part of my sources or my search. This is a way you can streamline this a little bit is by really thinking about what record types might be best for your project to put in your guide.

Nicole (27m 15s):
It’s a good point. Next is cemetery records. And as you’ll hear, these are in alphabetical order, so they can kind of help you jump to the right section. So general was first and that’s not really alphabetical, but then Bible cemetery, census church, and so forth. So for cemetery records, there might be published books that have lists of cemetery records in them. You can also put a link to find a great event, billion graves or transcriptions online at USGenWeb or other places where people have made a transcription of an entire cemetery. So there might be different kinds that you can also look at these categories in the family search catalog, because many of these correspond to categories in that catalog, and they will often have links to books and things.

Nicole (28m 1s):
So you might want to only put things that are digital, or maybe you’d like to separate it. And sometimes I’ll just make a note that says, there’s these three cemetery books at the family history library. This one is digitized. The other three, you have to go to the library to see them,

Diana (28m 16s):
Right. And again, every locality will be so different for cemetery records. Now, when we come to census records, when I’m doing my locality guide by the state level, I like to put in links to all the state censuses. And again, that is very different for each state. Some states have a lot of state censuses and they can be in various places on ancestry or family search, or sometimes they are just on a USGenWeb. So I like to see what I can find on a state level. Sometimes you even can find census records on a county or territorial colonial or a town census.

Diana (28m 57s):
If you’re up in New England, you’d be surprised how many different kinds of censuses there might be. We always just think of the federal censuses, but explore and see what other things there might be out there that you could put in your guide and put links to, or just help you be aware that they’re available.

Nicole (29m 16s):
Another thing you could do is put a note here. If the federal census records were lost for that locality. So in a Tennessee state guide, you would want to include, and that some of the early federal census records were lost for most of Tennessee and which remain. And that can also go in the record loss section, either one, maybe both places after census. The next section is church records and can be quite a lengthy list here. If you include all the various denominations and where the records are kept. So you may just want to link to the ones that are applicable to you in the moment and add to that leader, but there are some good listings of church records at the family search catalog that you can start with.

Nicole (30m 1s):
Right?

Diana (30m 1s):
That’s good advice to maybe just keep adding to that, cause that can seem kind of overwhelming. And that definitely is something you could add in the future. If you don’t want to dive into that at this point, now court records, I like to put, if I can find it a little screenshot of a website that has a court organization. So I’ve often found those where the state website will have this really nice little diagram of how the courts are organized. And the court systems in the states can be very, very different and they call their courts by different names. So I like to do an explanation of that or give myself a link to a website that helps me remember the organization of that area, of the courts.

Diana (30m 47s):
And that can be really helpful. And of course you’ll want to possibly linked to the court records on the family search catalog for that area or in state archives. You know, wherever you have found some good resources for court records,

Nicole (31m 4s):
The next section is ethnic records, and this is a place where you can list various ethnic groups in the locality. And what unique record collections are available about them. Sometimes you will have a group of say Swedish immigrants that all immigrated to the same place. And so they have their own newspapers and maybe there’s certain collections of records that are focused on this group. And so you can put those links right there in your locality guide.

Diana (31m 32s):
Another thing that you may not be thinking about that would be useful information. So next let’s talk about immigration and naturalization records and you can put links to collections on the major websites. And you may also be able to find some histories that talk about immigration for my Arkansas project. I found a great digitized book that is titled history of immigration to Arkansas, and it starts in 1673 and goes to 1903. And just like you were talking about Nicole, it talks about all the different groups that came into Arkansas.

Diana (32m 13s):
There were Polish immigrants, Italian colonies, and Irish colony, Bohemian colonists, Syrian Slavonian, and Greek immigration and Chinese immigrants. So how fun is that? And I think it’s always fascinating to think of all the different groups that have come into an area over the years. And you never know when you’ll need that information. And so if you have an ancestor that you suspect might have been part of group, and you definitely will want to seek out some information on immigration and naturalization in that specific area,

Nicole (32m 48s):
The next section is land records. And this is where you can link to different collections about land grants, patents, bounty, land, and other land records. So depending on if it’s a state land state or a federal land state, you’ll have different kinds of records there in Diana’s Arkansas guide, she put a great list of all the different laws that changed the way that land was given and granted in Arkansas. So the list of those laws is such a great idea.

Diana (33m 17s):
Yeah, Arkansas land was a little crazy and I think every state has their quirks with land. So if you can understand the land and get some things in there to help you, even just some simple things, you will be so grateful. So the next section is legislative records, and this is going to be different for each location. If you are in a colony, for instance, Virginia, you might have some colonial petitions for the colonial era, and then you might have the state petitions. Again, this is maybe a little bit deeper collection that you haven’t thought about, but I found the coolest thing in a Georgia legislative petition.

Diana (34m 3s):
It was the actual granting of my ancestors divorced in 18 and 14. I was so shocked that there would actually be this huge petition that was made for all the divorces. And then this document that granted the divorce back in the day, our ancestors were petitioning the government for all sorts of things that seems kind of foreign to us today that we would go petition that they would petition for all sorts of things. And the legislature’s actually both on the federal level, as well as the state level would create documents that your ancestor could be listed in. So it’s just another avenue of research and you might want to do a little exploration and see if there’s someplace for your locality that would give some records for your ancestors.

Nicole (34m 53s):
Absolutely. The next section is military records. And this is a very fun section because you get to look and see what regimental histories were available on the local level for different conflicts. And really what you can do is just list out each conflict. And then what records are available for those. And you might find books at a state level that lists all the people who died in the great war or a list of all of the people who served from a certain county. There’s all kinds of records that were created to honor the veterans and those who died in war. And then not to mention all the records that were created by the government who was mustering the troops. So the state militia and the federal government who created the pensions for the veterans and their, there are so many records that were created during these complex.

Nicole (35m 42s):
And so this is a really rich section of the locality guide.

Diana (35m 46s):
Yeah, I think sometimes we rely too much on just the online military records created by the federal government. And we forget that there were also records on the more local levels. You know, sometimes the county courthouse will just have a list of all the boys that went off to war and you just never know until you go see what you can find. Now, next in our list is newspapers. And this is a great place to list out all the newspapers for put a link. If you find a link to a great website that has us already try to put in this many newspapers for your specific time periods, you’re researching as possible. And so many times these, these papers would go into business and then they’d only last for 10 years and then somebody else would come in and change the name.

Diana (36m 33s):
And they would last for five years and you’d have to know that. So you could really do your good research. So your locality guide is a perfect place to put some specific details about the county newspapers or the state newspapers. And don’t forget that sometimes you have to go a little bit further than you would think for your newspaper research. So, you know, we’ve all seen those newspaper notices that are in the next state over. So you could even give yourself a little hint to look in some of the larger newspapers around that your ancestors could be listed in.

Nicole (37m 11s):
Yeah. That newspaper research can be challenging, but so rewarding when you find something that helps you next is probate records. These are very valuable. So make sure that you learn about the probate records in your region. These can include wills, the administration of estates, the probate of the states, the guardianship records, and a lot of information that includes relationships and often parent child relationships can be revealed through these probate records. So be sure to list out the different collections available for your county or state.

Nicole (37m 52s):
Usually these are kept on the county level or the township level. So you’ll want to be looking into those. It’s important to learn about the different types of collections, because you know, the loose Wells were separate from the well books where the Wells were copied into, which can be separate from the estate packets that have all of the documents and the debts and the payments to the family and the errors, which can have even more information beyond what is in the will. So be sure to list out all those different types of collections for your county

Diana (38m 26s):
Next, after probate records, we have vital records and this covers birth marriage and death. And these are often where we can be little overwhelmed with how many different collections there might be to put into our guide because the major websites like FamilySearch and Ancestry tend to have a lot of collections for these. But the nice thing about actually putting them all into your locality guide for your location is that you can make sure you’ve covered your bases and looked at every collection. So often we might check a major collection of say Marriages from a state and our person’s not found there.

Diana (39m 7s):
And we forget to go and look at the coverage. And we realized that that major collection had no records for our specific county. So you can make yourself some notes, you know, you can say, well, this is Arkansas marriages, 1837 to 1944, and there’s some years missing check the coverage table. So this just gives you kind of a chance to look and see how good the records are for that area and where to find them and go beyond just the regular websites that we always tend to check and see if there is something a little bit smaller, maybe there’s been a book published.

Diana (39m 48s):
That’s a different collection than you might’ve thought of. Think a little bit outside the box, do some Google searching, see what you can find for some of those vital records. This is also a really good place to link to how to get the ones that you have to send for. So, you know, if you’ve got a place to send for the death certificate, the state office, or, you know, the website and put in there how much it costs, sometimes that can be a little tricky figuring that out. And if you’ve figured it out once, why not just put it in your guide so that when you go to do that search again, or order another record, it’s right there for you.

Nicole (40m 26s):
Good idea. The next section is for tax records and you can list out these different record collections typically at the local level, but then also at the state level and federal level, when I’ve worked with tax records in the past, I’ve found like a specific town in Massachusetts had taxes that were levied by the town, then different county level taxes, state level taxes. And then of course the federal taxes. So whatever jurisdiction you’re looking at, there are probably some kind of tax records to include in your list.

Diana (40m 58s):
Yeah, I will agree with that because the government’s always wanted to get some money from people. So we’re going to have some good tax records. Well, that is the last section we have in our locality guide template. But there’s a note at the end that says, add additional sections depending on your locality and what types of records exist. So obviously if you are researching in Norway, you will want to add a section for specific records for that location. Or if you are researching in Mexico, there might be another record set that we haven’t mentioned, make the locality guide your own, put in there. What is applicable to your project and give yourself a time limit.

Diana (41m 41s):
One of the questions we have is how much time should I be spending? I’ve spent 20 hours on this and I’m not done. So we always say, just give yourself a time limit and say, I’m only going to spend three hours on this or only five hours. Remember it’s a work in progress. I go back and add things to my locality guides all the time. There’s nothing wrong with doing a light locality guide and then going back and adding more details as you need to the whole point is to help you learn about your area. Because after we took locality, you’re going to be doing some research planning, which will be our topic for next week.

Diana (42m 22s):
And how are you going to know what to plan for your research? Unless you have a really good, solid idea of what is out there, which is why we put the locality guide section right here. Number three, to get us ready for research planning. Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode. I wanted to give an update when I did this research, I stated that I didn’t have a state locality guide for Missouri, but in the meantime I took a SLIG course. That’s the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy. And it was all about Missouri and the really great thing that was an outcome of that was my Missouri state locality guide. So every time we had a class in the course and I learned something new, you know, we had classes on the history and the repositories, I would just build my guide.

Diana (43m 13s):
So I have a fabulous guide now in Missouri. So fun. Well, good job. Also, in the meantime, I read the book on the Ozarks by Brooks Blevins. And as you listened to the podcast, maybe you realized that this was taking place in the Ozarks there on the border of Missouri and Arkansas. So reading the book gave me a lot of background information on that time, that locality. So that was fun. Just want to dimension that we are continually learning about our locality. Wow,

Nicole (43m 44s):
Absolutely. There’s always more to learn. All right, well, we’ll talk to you guys all again next week. Bye.

Diana (43m 53s):
Okay. Bye-bye

Nicole (43m 53s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.