RLP 315: Tips for When the Courthouse Burned

Nicole (0s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 315 Five Tips for When the Courthouse Burned. 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.

Nicole (41s):
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. Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com. Hello everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast.

Diana (49s):
Well, hello Nicole. How are you doing today?

Nicole (51s):
Great, but we just started summer, so it’s a little busier

Diana (55s):
When you have children at home. It indeed is a different kind of busy.

Nicole (60s):
Yeah, we’ve been to the pool a lot already. Well, what’s up with you?

Diana (1m 5s):
Well, I’ve been working on the wrap up from my Cline project. You know, I finished my report, finished all the research, and I decided I wanted to organize all my documents that I had discovered because I had browsed a lot of tax records and found these tax lists. I’d ordered some land records from the National Archives and I wanted to get those really well done, those documents so that if I uploaded those to family search or my ancestry tree, they’d have the citation on them and had the title. So I’ve been working on that and it’s been really fun. I just do it in Canva and take my citation straight from my research log and copy and paste it right onto the document and upload the original document.

Diana (1m 48s):
And then I highlight with the transparent yellow box, the actual place in the tax list or the census or whatever that the ancestor is named, so that you know when you look at a list and there’s 30 people on it, you don’t have to try to go through it again and see where is your guy. So anyway, I’ve been having fun. It’s one of those tasks where you don’t need a lot of brain power and it’s good to do at the end of the day when you’re kind of tired, but it’s very fulfilling to get that done. So I’ve decided I wanna do this at the end of every project just to get my documents in good shape.

Nicole (2m 19s):
Well that’s great. Good job. You know, one thing I just discovered, which is kind of funny, you probably already knew this, that in Airtable you can copy and paste into the attachment column. So if you like make a snipping of an article or a record with your like Windows snipping tool, then just put it in the attachment column and then click paste. It will put the document right there for you and then it’s just there.

Diana (2m 45s):
Oh, that’s easier. ’cause what I have been doing, you know, I’ve been doing attachments for a long time, I would do the snip and then just save it to my downloads and then upload it. So pacing would be easier.

Nicole (2m 56s):
Yeah, it’s pretty great. I don’t know if that’s because I just upgraded recently to the paid plan or if it’s just a new thing or we just didn’t know how to do it. But it’s been great. And I was gonna say that I don’t usually add the citation to the image, I just put it in the metadata or whatever. Well I name it and then you know how we do it. But I think that is really nice to have that done for sharing and for attaching those citations to the record so that it doesn’t get confused or lost. One thing I noticed is with a lot of the records that I took pictures of with my phone is that in Google Photos I can type unlimited amount of paragraphs into the description for that picture.

Nicole (3m 37s):
And so I’ve been putting kind of like some basic citation information there, which is great because I remember now what it is, but like in five years I probably wouldn’t. So

Diana (3m 47s):
That’s a really, really good point. And I know people do that will put their citations sometimes in the metadata, which is a great idea. Also, just so long as we are somehow identifying these different images that we either take like you did or we’re downloading from various websites.

Nicole (4m 5s):
Yeah. So that it doesn’t just say IMG 4 9 3 8 0 6 5 2 1 2.

Diana (4m 14s):
Exactly,

Nicole (4m 15s):
Exactly. Well for our announcements, we have the next webinar and the Research Like a Pro webinar series coming up on August 20th. It’s going to be presented by Steve Little. The title is Who’s Eli’s Daddy? A Civil War Era Open Secret. And this is a DNA case study and this is going to be about a man named James Eli Bauer, who was born in 1863 in Ash County, North Carolina during the Civil War. And there’s some oral history going on here and talking about how he was the son of a confederate soldier who allegedly didn’t return home to his wife and children, but another woman, Margaret Bauer.

Nicole (4m 57s):
And nine months later, Bali Bauer was born and that’s his nickname Bali. Gotta love these names. Then shortly after that, the soldier passed away. And so this case study shows DNA analysis both of autosomal and YDNA to see if it can confirm or refute this family legend about who the father was. And the name of the proposed father is William McMillan. So this is gonna be a great lecture. The topics include North Carolina Civil War, non paternity event, oral family history, YDNA, autosomal, DNA, pedigree collapse, endogamy multiple relationships and visualization techniques in genetic genealogy.

Nicole (5m 38s):
So if you have not signed up for our Research Like a Pro webinar series, and this sounds interesting to you, make sure you sign up and you can register anytime and you can see all of the previous recordings for the webinar series from this year. And then you can attend Zoom for any upcoming monthly webinars. Those reports that go with each of these case studies and the recordings will be available. You have lifetime access to those. Well, our next Research Like a Pro study group is this fall beginning August 28th. Early bird registration for that ends July 31st. So if you’re thinking about registering, make sure you do so before July 31st to get the discount. And if you’re trying to learn Airtable and you need some help, consider looking into our Airtable quick reference guides.

Nicole (6m 21s):
We have one focusing on DNA matches and the other one just on Airtable basics. Those are PDF guides you can purchase on our website for $10. Well, if you are interested at all in learning about artificial intelligence, we are having a workshop, Research Like a Pro with AI, July 29th through August 1st and we hope to see you there. You can join our newsletter to get all this news and coupons, just go to FamilyLocket.com and click on sign up.

Diana (6m 48s):
Well thanks for taking us through all of our announcements. So many fun things happening this summer and this fall. Well, I’m excited today to talk about burned courthouse research and using my example of the Cline research, which took place in northeastern Arkansas with two burned counties. So I think sometimes we see this and we don’t even know what to do. I know years ago when I was working on this project trying to figure out the family for Clemsy Cline, I just did not know what to do and I left it alone because it didn’t seem like there was any way to tackle this. So I’m really happy now that I have actually reconstructed the family I very strong hypothesis.

Diana (7m 31s):
So I thought we would share some of tips for dealing with record loss. So the very first tip is to discover the extent of the record loss. We often just wanna jump into researching our ancestors, but this is part of the locality research in understanding what is actually available. So this is the first step whether your courthouse burned or maybe it was flooded or there was a tornado. You know, we hear all these stories about how something happened and took out the records, but it could be that some of those records survived. So a really good place to get started to learn about your county is the family search wiki. And every wiki page for a county will show a nice table with the beginning date for government county records.

Diana (8m 16s):
So let’s look at a couple of examples. This client project takes place in Izard County and Fulton County and they both suffered this record loss after the Civil War. So the Civil War kind of continued for a while in the Ozarks of northeastern Arkansas and there was a lot of fighting back and forth between ex Confederates and ex Union soldiers. So we see sadly, the loss of a lot of courthouses. I don’t know why it was so fun to burn the courthouse, you know, when you’re attacking a community. But the Wiki page does have a little caveat that they always include and it says, information for this chart was taken from various sources, often containing conflicting dates.

Diana (8m 57s):
This information should be taken as a guide and should be verified by contacting the county and or the state government agency. So I think that’s really wise to use it as a guide, but then actually contact the county courthouse and see if they perhaps have a few records that maybe family search didn’t digitize and are not in this table. So with Izard County, Arkansas, there are no records before 1889. So marriage court land probate, they all begin in 1889, which is certainly not going to help me when my case is there in 1840 and 1850s. So you know, that’s always discouraging when you see that.

Diana (9m 40s):
And I contrast that with Cape Gerardo, Missouri, which also had a courthouse fire and this one was in 1870. But when you look at the table on Family Search Wiki, you’ll see that they’ve got marriage starting at 1805, court at 1815, land records at 1821, probate at 1805. So at first glance you might think, oh no, there’s nothing there ’cause the courthouse burned. But in reality there’s plenty of records early on. So you know, two different scenarios with the same thing that happened with the courthouse burning.

Nicole (10m 15s):
Yeah, it’s interesting how each county just has a different type of record loss and some have more loss and others have less and some have like reconstructed records, So, it’s good to really figure that out. Well the next tip is to seek alternate jurisdictions. Usually this is the biggest tip to find records when a county has suffered a loss. And so we can look at a state level or a federal level or even private bodies like churches or newspapers or businesses where records weren’t held at the county courthouse that suffered a fire or some kind of disaster. So what is a jurisdiction? This is a political, administrative, religious or private body that has authority over a region or people and keeps records for a specific purpose.

Nicole (11m 3s):
So if you find that there has been record loss at one jurisdiction, records from another can fill the gap. So if you look in our blog post about this topic, you’ll see a table that has record types at various jurisdictions. So for private jurisdictions you’ll find like church records, cemetery records, newspaper business societies, directories, school records and so forth. And some of these overlap with, for example, the town or city jurisdiction. And then some don’t overlap. Some are unique. So for the town and the private, the things that overlap there would be maybe like school records where you know the school might have its own records, whereas as the town might also have school records that are kept and maintained at the town level and then at the county or district level, you’ll see vital in court and probate and tax records.

Nicole (11m 54s):
Whereas it also overlaps with the state and province level where you’ll see also tax records kept at the state level. And that’s because the tax records were usually sent from the county. A copy was made and sent to the state. So make sure you look at the table to see the wide variety of records available at each type of jurisdiction. And then the overlap where you can find replacement records for ones that were lost while Clemsy Cline Weatherford has been a brick wall ancestor for years because of the Izard County Arkansas record loss. And we only knew that she lived in that location from the indirect evidence of her husband’s tax listings in 1839 and 1845.

Nicole (12m 39s):
But by 1850 the Weatherford family had moved north to Morgan County, Missouri and then onto Texas by 1860. So with no marriage record for Clemsy and Henderson Weatherford, we knew we know her maiden name just from the death certificates of her children. So luckily we have those, But the family doesn’t appear in the 1840 census, which would be really helpful if we could find them there to place them in a community. But they haven’t been found on that census yet or just weren’t counted. Maybe they were just in transit. Well, a derivative record in the form of a book compiled by Desmond Walls, Allen provided the tax listings for Henderson Weatherford and the tax list had been sent to the state, just like I said earlier.

Nicole (13m 24s):
And so they survived the county record loss. And revisiting that book you found entries for John Cline and John C Cline also in Izard County in 1839 and 1845. So could these be relatives of Clemsy? Were these Johns the same man or two different men? There were some more questions,

Diana (13m 46s):
Right. The great thing about those tax records was that Sarah was not a huge list of clients. There were only these two. And you know, if there had been like 20 different people, then I would’ve had to wade through all of them, but I was able to focus on John and John C Cline. So our next step with this whole idea of a Burn county is to really take a look at the family search catalog and see what is available because Family Search is free and has digitized so many records throughout the United States and throughout the world and is continuing to do that, we can take a look at these jurisdictions on the catalog and you may not have really noticed how you can do this.

Diana (14m 32s):
So I wanted to walk everyone listening through this. So I often will start at the county level, so Izard County. But as we’ve mentioned, when the records are not available you have to go to a different jurisdiction. And so federal level, we always have the federal censuses, those are available in this era, at least for Arkansas. There are federal land records and there were the images of the original tax records sent to the state. So those tax records I knew had to be somewhere. All I had was this book and I wanted to look at the originals because of course we want to see if the derivative record, you know, the person compiling that read it correctly.

Diana (15m 14s):
And I was not sure where these tax records were. I thought maybe they didn’t survive or maybe they were at the Arkansas State Archives. Were they on a state website? And so first I decided just to try Family Search Catalog and see if they were there and I went to the Izard County page and I always go there and and look at taxation. But when I looked at taxation, it was just the same book, you know the one by Desmond Allen Walls. So then I decided I would look at the state level. So I went to Arkansas, the Arkansas page and saw an entry for Arkansas tax records 1821 to 1884. And there they were.

Diana (15m 54s):
They were all digitized. I could view those from home. They had every county I had to go through and find the ones for Isard County. So that was an exciting find and I just had assumed they would be on the county page and they were on the state page. So something else to note is each catalog page will have Links to these other jurisdictional levels. So from within the county page, I could click on the state Arkansas page or there’s the option for places within and places within our smaller communities. Often what I see when clicking into those are things like church records, school records or cemetery records for that specific community within the county. So always click around on the family search catalog page and check out those different jurisdictions and don’t make the mistake like I was doing at first by just looking at the county and thinking there’s nothing for the tax records here in this county.

Diana (16m 47s):
I probably thought that for a few years till I actually returned to this project, right?

Nicole (16m 52s):
Locality guides are so amazing and we do have to consider all the different jurisdictions to include in our locality guide and that’s so important. So good job. And thanks for the tips. I think those are really helpful tips, especially looking at the different jurisdictions that are connected to the catalog pages,

Diana (17m 12s):
Right? They make it easy for us. We just have to think to click on it and then look through it.

Nicole (17m 17s):
Yeah, we just have to get so good at clicking on everything

Diana (17m 22s):
That’s not hard.

Nicole (17m 24s):
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Nicole (18m 5s):
Use promo code FamilyLocket for a 20% discount on your subscription. That’s code FamilyLocket and celebrate the stories of a lifetime with Newspapers.com. Well the next tip is to discover all the available records for every clue. So when you’re working with record loss, it’s really important to extract every clue from every available record. So of course you wanna put that into a research log. And as you are adding more clues, you can return to the research log or timeline or both to see how everything is fitting together. And it can also be helpful at this time to create tables and maps to really see the data more easily. So as you’re researching, you should be constantly correlating all of the clues.

Nicole (18m 48s):
Well, in the federal census we can get a lot of clues about residents, migration, household members, and more so when the courthouse burns, we can kind of rely on these records, especially if we have located our family in them to give a good foundation for other records. And Clemsy first appears in the 1850s census and at that time she resided in Morgan County, Missouri with her husband Henderson Weatherford. And their presumed children, two Cline children who were likely her kin were also present in the household. And of note was the birth location of all the children who were born in Arkansas giving us evidence of their previous residence.

Nicole (19m 30s):
Looking at Clemsy D Weatherford, the youngest Weatherford child, we can see that they were in Arkansas up until two years before the 1850 census, which was 1848. So they had recently moved to Missouri. Well the same 1850 census page shows the household of Jacob Cline and like the Weatherford household, a Mihaela and a Robert Cline were named last indicating maybe they were boarders. And Mihaela shares an Alabama birthplace with Clemsy. So that gives a clue that maybe they were both from the same place in Alabama. And Robert Cline shares an Arkansas birthplace with the children in the Weatherford household. So all the children in the Weatherford household were born in Arkansas, the WeatherFords and the unknown Cline children who were Toletha Cline and John Cline ages 10 and eight.

Nicole (20m 16s):
So they’re all showing kind of this similar migration route. We have some people from Alabama and some from Arkansas. Well the Jacob Cline household included some people born in Virginia. That was Jacob, the head of household age 39. And then Talitha Cline, age 43, born in Kentucky and then Reuben and Jonam Cline ages 13 and 12, born in Kentucky and then they went to Missouri where Elizabeth Cline was born, age 11 down to Basil Cline, who was born in Missouri. So. it looks like they might have come to Missouri sooner than the Weatherford family, but they did have the Robert Cline in their household who is five years old, along with Mahala Cline who was 22.

Nicole (20m 58s):
And so they kind of seem like a mother and a son maybe, who were living with this Jacob Cline family. And the Robert Cline was born in Arkansas. So we definitely see some connections in the names and in the places of birth of the family kind of showing this migration path, while looking at every single clue in this 1850 census, we can hypothesize that Mahala and Jacob could be clumsy siblings and that the three Cline children boarding were related. Somehow the Arkansas births pointed to residents for the Weatherford family and the three Cline children in Arkansas during the 1840s. And also to Letha, John and Robert seemed to be of appropriate ages to be siblings.

Nicole (21m 38s):
So Robert was five. And then in the Weatherford household there was Talitha and John who were 10 and eight. So 10, eight and five could definitely be siblings. And if you know, they couldn’t all be in the same home and they were kind of splitting up. That makes sense.

Diana (21m 52s):
Right. You know, when I first looked at this, I thought the same thing that you said that maybe Mahala was the mother of Robert, but if these three children were siblings, Alisa’s 10 and so Mahala would’ve had a child at age 12, which doesn’t necessarily make sense, does it? So you can see why this was such a conundrum. You know, who are these children? We know they’re related somehow these clients. So you know, next I went to the federal land records because that’s what I had for the census. And federal land records can be searched on the Bureau of Land Management website by state and county. So right away I could go to Arkansas, Izard County and put in Cline, just that surname to see who will pop up.

Diana (22m 36s):
And I found three individuals who patented land between 1841 and 1850. John C Cline, John Cline, we’ve seen them before in the tax list and Mahalo Cline. And so of course when I saw Mahalo Cline, I wondered, is this the same Mahalo that shows up in the 1850 census? So this was the exact period that the WeatherFords were residing in in Izard County because of the tax listings for Henderson. And so I mapped out the land patents and they were all in the northern portion of Izard County and I wanted to make sure I had every available record. So the land patents are available for free, they’ve been digitized, they’re the the final land patent.

Diana (23m 20s):
But I knew that to obtain that the individual had to apply and that those applications are at the National Archives in Washington dc. So I ordered those from a researcher, onsite researcher and went through those. And what I really like about those original applications, you get the original date when they first applied and it’s often a few years before the final patent. So then you know, when they really are appearing in this county, it often takes a few years to finalize the patent. And so I found that John Cline, and at this point he was called John Cline, that he applied for a patent in 1838 and it was approved or the final one issued in 1844.

Diana (24m 8s):
So that’s a big difference of six years for you know, knowing whether someone was in the area. And this really helped to correlate with clumsy being there in 1839 from the tax record and knowing that John was there by 1838 to apply for a patent So it just putting these people in the same place the same time, which was helpful. And the other record that I wanted to explore was the land tracked book entries for each of these clients. So these again are available, these are on family search and they’re not completely indexed. They have been indexed, but I have found that it’s easier for me just to browse them by state.

Diana (24m 49s):
And then the county and then the volume and the township and range, the indexing didn’t seem to pull up all the people very easily for me. So I wanted to just do it the old fashioned way, which sometimes we have to do. So these are a little bit tricky to figure out. There’s a family search wiki page called United States Bureau of Land Management tracked books inventory, and that’s where you go to find the actual volume number. And so they have it organized for you and it helps you to see how to, to search in these tracked books. But what they are, they’re just images of these big books where they have recorded the name of the person, the land description, the dates. It’s basically the same information as the applications I found.

Diana (25m 33s):
And I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything extra there I was missing because we have to get every detail we can when we have limited records. So, it was quite a feat doing that for all of these records. I had six different land patents and so six different land applications and six different track book entries. But thankfully I had my good research log where I could put all the details. So one of the things that I found very interesting as I was doing all this research was how the county split. So Izard County was a parent county and about 1842 they took part of Izard and made Fulton County.

Diana (26m 18s):
And so even though the original land patents were begun in Izard, the people ended up being residents of Fulton County. So that’s always confusing and always kind of a challenge. And of course as soon as I discovered that, I was excited to look at Fulton County but found it also severed record loss and So. It wasn’t going to help me either. So finally I wanted to track down those tax lists. I felt like I was getting a little bit more information from the land records, but I wanted more. So I went to those original tax lists and I went through the Cline’s year by year and I came upon a grape find in 1849. I found that John Cline had died and an Absalom Wiseman administered his estate and paid the tax.

Diana (27m 2s):
So at first I saw that and I thought, oh this is probably an older John Cline. I, I had a feeling that the one who was there in 1838 was older and that the John Cline who patented land about 10 years later could have been a son. And I just assumed it was the older man who had died until I found that John C Cline, elder, actually was on the 1850 census, very much alive as a 65-year-old man. So, it would seem that we actually have two John Clines for sure. And it was the younger one that died per the tax list where I saw the administrator for his estate. So ordinarily you would have a probate record or a court record, but those are gone.

Diana (27m 46s):
And so these tax records were the only place that I found that he had died.

Nicole (27m 51s):
Well there you go. Good job finding that out.

Diana (27m 55s):
Well it was tricky because it wasn’t under the Cs, it was under the Ws for Wiseman and so, you know, it was just going through the whole thing. And the reason I found it was because I thought maybe they’re at the end of the tax list for some reason when I didn’t find John under the Cs and then there I was at the end. So Wow. It’s a kind of a testament to sometimes reading the whole tax list for the county.

Nicole (28m 18s):
Yeah, absolutely. Well our next tip is to correlate the evidence. So once you’ve gathered all kinds of evidence from different jurisdictions and you’ve squeezed every clue you can out of every record, it’s good to compare and contrast and look at the data very carefully. And that’s correlating the tax entries had even more data than the land entries So. it was really helpful to use a table to make sense of all the data and you can see how the land is correlated with the tax list and this really helps to show which John patented which land. So in 1839, John C Clean, which is funny that they spelled it like that.

Nicole (29m 3s):
Instead of Cline C-L-E-A-N and John Clean each paid a poll tax indicating that they were separate men and won already had land and the other had only a horse and four cattle. So correlating the evidence from these three record sets available federal census, federal land and state tax list, we can put together a profile for each client in Izard and Fulton Counties. So let’s go through both of them. We have John C Cline Senior and John Cline Jr. So first John C Cline Senior. He first appeared in Izard County, Arkansas in 1838 applying for a land patent for 40 acres that was finalized in 1844.

Nicole (29m 45s):
He went on to patent an additional 40 acre parcel in 1839 and 1844, bringing his total land to 80 acres. When Fulton County was created from Izard, he became a resident of that county. He paid taxes on the Izard County land in 1839 and 1841, but had sold the land by 1850 when the tax list showed George French paying tax on the land originally granted to John C Cline. John was taxed instead on one and then two town lots having sold his 120 acres. John resided in Fulton County, Arkansas with his presumed wife and four children. Now let’s see the profile of John Cline Jr.

Nicole (30m 28s):
John Cline Jr. paid a poll tax in Izard County, Arkansas in 1839, headed a household in Morgan County, Missouri in 1840 and then applied for three land patents in Izard County, Arkansas in 1847 and 1848. Those patents state his residence as Fulton County in 1847 and Pulaski County in 1849. John Cline Jr. Left no records in Pulaski County, Arkansas. Don’t you love it when that happens?

Diana (30m 58s):
I was excited about Pulaski too until there was nothing there

Nicole (31m 2s):
That happened to me too recently where I found another place that was mentioned as a residence. Then you look there and there’s just nothing. Well, maybe there’s something, but we haven’t found it yet. Well, continuing on this profile of John Cline Jr. The tax list of Fulton County reveal his death by 1849 when Absalon Wiseman administrator for the estate of John Cline paid the taxes on his patented land. So that right there is such a good example of how correlating the land location and the tax list gave you really good information about who was who and which man was the one who passed away.

Diana (31m 39s):
Exactly. And it makes sense that John Jr left no records on Pulaski because he died. No, he must have just been there very briefly. Yeah,

Nicole (31m 48s):
With these land, I was gonna say land speculators and I don’t know if that’s true that they were land speculators, but it seems like at this era it was really common for people to be continually moving and trying to get new land or better land, or trying to make money from buying and then selling the land. So it’s interesting to see how quickly they moved.

Diana (32m 6s):
That’s very true. Land speculation was huge in this era.

Nicole (32m 10s):
That was such a great discovery about, you know, Absalon Wiseman becoming the administrator. What good tax records those were. Well after that, in 1852, Sally Cline paid the tax on one of the land parcels and Sarah Blair paid the tax on the other two. By 1843, Irvin Blair paid the tax for the two parcels and no mention was made of Sally Cline for the other parcel. Sarah Cline residing in the household of F Heron in 1850 in Fulton County could be the widow of John Cline Jr. With twins born in 1848, she may have been his second wife and upon his death sent his three other children north to Missouri with Mahala Cline and Clemsy Cline Weatherford.

Nicole (32m 51s):
The twins lived with Ferguson Herron in 1860, but Sarah possibly died as she was not present. Two other younger girls are listed in the household and could be her daughters or they could be other relatives of Ferguson Heron.

Diana (33m 5s):
So when I was doing the correlation of this, it was exciting to see that Sarah Sally, yeah, that was the widow of John Cline and maybe finding a hypothesis for these three children. So let’s talk about Mihaela and then we’ll kind of wrap this all up. Great. So Mihaela Cline applied for her land patents as a young woman in 1844. And the 1850 tax list revealed George French paying taxes on land originally patented by her. So without a deed, you know, ’cause the deeds don’t survive. This lets us know that she would’ve sold the land to George and she was gone, which correlates with this Mahala Cline who shows up in 1850 in Morgan County, Missouri in the household of Jacob Cline with Robert age five, then Mahala married Thomas Shockley in 1854.

Diana (33m 57s):
So you know, there have been some people online who have thought that Mahala was the wife of John Cline, but it doesn’t make sense because she was young and she got married and the marriage records says Mahala Cline. You know, it doesn’t make sense that she would’ve been a widow of John Cline because now we know that John Junior’s wife was Sally or Sarah and she stayed behind in Arkansas. So my hypothesis right now is that Mahala and those three Cline children after their dad died, just went north with the WeatherFords. They all went up to Morgan County and for whatever reason, you know, maybe they just didn’t like Isard County at the time and their hypothesized brother Jacob said, come up here and live.

Diana (34m 41s):
This is, this is better up here. You know, who knows why people move around. But it was exciting to finally think of a scenario that fit with Mahala and those three Cline children. So, you know, of course there’s more work to be done and in a future episode I will reveal what I have found out with the DNA in working on this project.

Nicole (35m 4s):
That’s great. It seems like you made a lot of progress with all the correlation that you did and it’s been fun to hear how you were able to put together the identities through the tax list and, and I know those tax lists were difficult to wade through, but they were just so worth it.

Diana (35m 18s):
Oh my goodness. Absolutely. Yeah. I would have had no idea about John Cline if I hadn’t found that estate record and the idea of his wife. So the land descriptions and correlating that with the land records. Yeah, that was very, very helpful. And then you can’t forget about the census records because those give give us family groupings.

Nicole (35m 39s):
Right. Those are super important. Alright, well you can really tell a lot from these record substitutes. So hopefully you got some ideas for how to approach your difficult challenges with burned counties or record loss in any jurisdiction that you’re trying to use records for. And so good luck with your record loss and your continuing research in any kind of situation that might result in having to use substitute records.

Diana (36m 8s):
Right. Well thanks everyone for listening and we’ll talk to you next time.

Nicole (36m 12s):
Bye. 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.