RLP 363: A Day at the Chamber County Courthouse: Tips for Success

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 363, A Day at the Chamber County Courthouse: Tips for Success.

Nicole (41s):
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. Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hey everybody, welcome to Research Like a Pro and Hi Mom.

Diana (51s):
Hi Nicole. How are you doing?

Nicole (53s):
I’m doing great. I was just remembering how much fun we had at the NGS Conference in Louisville. That was so fun.

Diana (1m 1s):
It really was. I really liked the city. It was a neat city with a lot of interesting things as we walked around. It was just something kind of fascinating around every corner, like the red penguins that were on the hotel/museum and the gold David and the SAR museum, what they’re going to have there. So Sons of the American Revolution were our local host for the NGS conference, and we went a few blocks away from where the conference was held at the Galt Hotel. And it was so neat to see the library and see what this amazing museum will be. So I really enjoy just walking around the Louisville downtown and seeing the sites.

Nicole (1m 45s):
Right. Remember all the horses painted in different colors? Those were pretty,

Diana (1m 48s):
That’s right. The horses were so fun. It really is just a little bit quirky and historical all in one and there was also the Louisville Slugger Factory Museum there. And so on that street there were little home plates with famous baseball players and a bat, you know, so there was just all sorts of neat things there to see.

Nicole (2m 12s):
There were, and I really loved the SAR Library, the Sons of the American Revolution, that was their national headquarters and they just had a beautiful library and research facility that we could have spent a lot more time in. It was fun to look around and get a tour of the future museum, and I really enjoyed so many parts of the conference. I loved presenting with you about research planning with AI. I enjoyed the sponsored lunches, which we got to do this time. We decided just to sign up for both of those. And they were both kind of focused on military things. So the first one was the New England Historical and Genealogical Society, N-E-H-G-S, also known as American Ancestors, their website at least.

Nicole (2m 59s):
And the speaker was Ryan Woods and he was talking about researching and exploring Revolutionary War soldiers, Patriots, loyalists during the American Revolution. And he talked a little bit about some sources that might be helpful for us in our Welch ancestry who that family line, I think they might have been loyalists. And there’s some connection to a potential father for our George Welch named Nicholas Welch. And there was a Nicholas Welch who was a loyalist who fled South Carolina. And one of the sources that Ryan Woods mentioned was a newspaper in South Carolina for loyalists, I think.

Nicole (3m 40s):
So anyway, I wrote that down and it’ll be interesting to look, look more into that, but it was part of a database of early American newspapers that I need to explore, and that if you have a membership to American ancestors, then you have access to that early American newspapers database. So that was a fun tip that I picked up. And the other sponsored lunch was with Michael Strauss, who was teaching about the murder at the Galt House. So he was talking about like Civil War era, and it was actually two union soldiers who were in a fight and one killed a superior officer. So that was a crazy murder to learn about. He also talked about other murders that happened in amongst Confederate generals and things.

Nicole (4m 21s):
So pretty interesting to learn about.

Diana (4m 24s):
That was really fun. And we also were treated to a little, I don’t even know what to call it, we had some men dressed up in soldiers from, I think the Sons of the American Revolution. And they were dressed up in all sorts of different uniforms from that era, and they marched in with the flag and led us in the Pledge of Allegiance. So that was so fun. And they had someone playing a fife, and a drummer. So we had a little step back into time what it might’ve looked like to have been there when the Revolutionary War was fought and you had the drills. It was fun. I really loved having that theme of the American Revolution, kind of that military theme for both of those lunches.

Nicole (5m 10s):
Right. That was really interesting. And there were a couple classes that I enjoyed. I went to Bernie Bennett’s class about plantation records and she talks all about getting a plantation record book from a manuscript collection at Duke University. And that was really fascinating and how it recorded the names of her ancestors who were enslaved. And then Jill Morley did a class on data collection that was interesting and there were just so many good classes to watch later. They were all recorded so we can watch them all, even if we didn’t get to attend them in person. So it was a great conference.

Diana (5m 44s):
Right. I really appreciated the fact that they did the recordings because obviously we can’t go to everything, especially when we’re teaching classes. So I, I’m excited to go back and watch and learn from our peers. We have so many people who just have these wonderful specialties and things to share and teach us. And we also had fun in the expo hall just wandering around and looking at the different booths. We didn’t have one for FamilyLocket at this time, so we were free to wander and visit with friends and see all the neat things that people had brought. So it was a great conference and we’re excited because next year they have announced that it will be in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which is the home of the famous Allen County Library, which is the second largest genealogy library, second only to the FamilySearch library in Salt Lake City.

Diana (6m 38s):
So I’ve never been to Allen County to that library and already looking forward to NGS 2026. So hopefully everyone will start making their plans now to attend that. It will be the end of May. I believe it’s something like the 29th and 30th of May, so not Memorial Day weekend this time said the week after, which will probably be easier for people to get away and attend. Well, let’s do some announcements. So we are excited about our July webinar for our Research Like a Pro Webinar Series. And this will be presented by Yvonne Fenster, who’s one of our FamilyLocket genealogist researchers.

Diana (7m 19s):
The title is Untangling Family Networks: Using Documentary Research and DNA Analysis to Search for Glen Hopper’s Father.

Diana (8m 2s):
So tinvestigation uses Y-DNA and autosomal DNA evidence combined with documentary research to explore Glen Hugh Hopper’s paternal origins in early 20th-century Tennessee. Y-DNA established the Daniel surname for Glen’s father, but which of Marcus Daniel’s sons could be Glen’s father? What documentary evidence, from census records to Civil War pension files, could provide the geographic and chronological context needed to evaluate each Daniel brother as a potential father candidate? How could BanyanDNA analysis help navigate the complex genetic relationships between the Daniel brothers when their families were so heavily intermarried? So topics for this will be Early 20th-century Tennessee Research, Unknown Parentage, Genetic Genealogy, BanyanDNA, Multiple Relationships, Pedigree Collapse, Y-DNA Analysis, Indirect Evidence, Census Records, Land Records, Tax Records, Civil War Pension File, and Social Security Application.

Diana (8m 49s):
So this will be fascinating and Yvonne is really skilled at Banyan DNA and using it for pedigree collapse in multiple relationships, which is so difficult to do, and which is a superpower of Banyan. So just a little bit about Yvonne. She’s a professional genealogist. She’s accredited through ICAPGen in the upper south region of the United States and brings her expertise in DNA, invol, particularly in cases involving cousin marriages and YDNA research for breaking through genealogical brick walls. So we’re lucky to work with her and enjoy learning from her. And so we hope you’ll join us. Well, our next study group will be starting on August 27th, 2025, and registration is now open. So we are excited for a new study group and invite anyone ready to dive in and learn the Research Like a Pro process or return to the Research Like a Pro process.

Diana (9m 35s):
If you’ve done a study group with us before, if you’d like to be a peer group leader, the application is on our website and you will receive complimentary registration. And then please join our newsletter that comes out every Monday with new posts, upcoming lectures, coupon codes and more. Alright, well what are we talking about today? We are talking about a day at the Chambers County Courthouse, Tips for Success. So this is next in the series that I wrote about my onsite research in Alabama. Previously we talked about the Alabama archives, and today we’re talking all about the courthouse.

Diana (10m 16s):
So what can you find at the county courthouse? Well, it’s going to have records kept on the county level, and these are things like deeds, mortgages, marriages, wills, guardianships. And these are on the most local level usually unless you have a town. But these are so important and vital for our research. And although many of these items may be available online, some might only be at the courthouse and you may want to schedule a trip to the courthouse just to perform that reasonably exhaustive research. Make sure you have covered all of your bases. So the Chambers County Alabama Courthouse is where a lot of records are from my Thomas Beverly Royston, and he lived there from about 1842 to his death in 1868.

Diana (11m 8s):
I had gathered many records from Ancestry and FamilySearch, but I still wanted to look at the originals and I wanted to see if I could discover anything extra about his life and family. And so that’s what we will be talking about today. Sharing some tips for researching at the courthouse.

Nicole (11m 26s):
Before spending time at the courthouse, it’s good to pre-create a research plan and if you’ve created a timeline for the ancestor, then you’ll have a pretty good idea about the years to search for various land tax marriages and probate records and printing your timeline will give you a good reference point for any records you need to locate. So that would be good to bring along with you. And since you may not know specifically what records will be available, you can list various possibilities. And in this case, Diana had already located many land records from FamilySearch’s, microfilm, but the copies weren’t very good and she wanted to get the originals. And so those were on her research plan. So if you can, you can try to learn what records are available at the courthouse that are not online and compare what’s at the FamilySearch digitized catalog versus what’s not.

Nicole (12m 13s):
You might have to just do this yourself once you get there. But some courthouses might have a website that details their historical records and most probably don’t. The Chambers County website had information for citizens and their current needs. There wasn’t really a page for the archives of the records room. And a fellow researcher had visited the courthouse a few months beforehand and had noted the various record types and sent a picture of the large record books on the shelves and a ladder used to access them. So that helped Diana get prepared by envisioning the fact that she would be needing to climb up on a ladder in order to access the large books.

Nicole (12m 53s):
Also, it’s important when planning the visit to know the courthouse’s opening hours and call ahead to make sure it’s open and the website will usually provide the hours and phone numbers needed. When I visited the courthouse in Love County, I tried to find out like, are you closed any days this week for holidays or you know, sometimes they’ll have things going on. Also, what time are you gonna be leaving for lunch? Like will there always be someone here? And those kind of things are good to know. Also, if you’re planning to take pictures with your phone and that kind of thing, you may want to consider bringing like an extra battery pack to charge your phone if you are gonna be there all day so that you don’t run out a battery.

Diana (13m 33s):
Great tips, well, you do need to be prepared for anything, and it’s a really good tip to dress in layers so you have no idea if it’s going to be cold or hot or just right in the records room. I was surprised that I had to go through a security checkpoint before entering, but that wasn’t too difficult. And once through, I was directed to the exact room where I could spend the next few hours and the books were shelved from floor to ceiling. So I did a quick overview just to see what was available, kind of get the lay of the land in the room. And I was grateful that it was not a warm day because there was not air conditioning in that room.

Diana (14m 12s):
There was a ceiling fan, but we’re talking Alabama, and it was April, and it was cool outside, but that room got stuffy, so I can’t even imagine what it would be like in say August in the heat of the summer. So I was very glad that I was there when it was not quite as warm. Well, I had taken my list of what I wanted to look at and my phone with the camera and my assistant, my husband and I went to work pulling out the different volumes, finding the records and taking photos. And what I did first was look through the original index books. They had these great big books and it was so neat just to go through those and look for the Royston surname.

Diana (14m 55s):
I had done this previously on the FamilySearch microfilm, but interestingly I had missed a few entries and I just found it so much easier to scan in person the index for whatever reason it’s larger And it was just so neat to see that. So I was really excited to find a record where my ancestor Robert C Royston and his brother Joseph, sold the land they had inherited from their father upon his death. I knew that they had inherited this land. And my Robert goes west of Texas very soon after. And I had always wondered what happened to his land that he inherited. But the index entry only says Joseph Royston et al.

Diana (15m 37s):
And in my previous scanning that index, I had not even noticed it. And so this time it jumped out at me and I found the record in the deed book and I thought it was exactly the deed that I’d hoped to find. Now the deed books had all been recopied, so they were not the big original deed books. And so they were photocopies of the originals and you know, that was fine. They were really good copies. But I thought it was interesting that only the indexes were the great big books that were seemed to be the originals. Well, let’s have a word from our Sponsor.

Diana (16m 21s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Break down genealogy brick walls with a subscription to the largest online newspaper archive.

Diana (17m 3s):
Did you know Newspapers.com has over 1 billion pages of digitized newspapers dating back to 1690? Their growing collection includes papers from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and beyond. Discover birth and marriage announcements, obituaries and everyday stories about your ancestors in seconds. Newspapers.com can help you fill in the gaps between vital records and reveal details about your ancestors’ lives that you can’t find anywhere else. Their easy to use search feature lets you filter your results by date, location, specific paper and more. When you find something interesting, Newspapers.com makes it a snap to share it with family and friends. You can even save it directly to your Ancestry tree. Come explore 1 billion pages and make infinite discoveries today on Newspapers.com. Use promo code FamilyLocket for a 20% discount on your subscription.

Nicole (17m 15s):
One of the challenges that Diana ran into during the courthouse research was differentiating between mortgage and deed records. And since both were grouped together in the indexes, she thought they would all be together in the deed books as well. But after doing multiple searches in the deed books for the mortgage record of C Royston, she gave up and thought the records were lost or misindexed. When she returned home and started entering the research into her Airtable research log, she took a closer look and discovered that the m signaled a mortgage record and she realized that there were separate books for these. So now she has to contact the courthouse and ask them to find the four records she missed. So what’s the lesson to learn?

Nicole (17m 55s):
Don’t assume anything and look as closely as you can at the indexes and the book titles. So just a little aside here is that the same thing happened to me at the Love County Courthouse and luckily I’ve had three days to do my research there, and so anything I missed on the first day, I could go back and work on again the next day. And I did have that situation where there were just some things like the mortgages for one, some of the mortgage books were hidden in the back area and I had to ask about them and some were not even there at the time, so I couldn’t get one of the things I needed. And then I also found out their books were organized in a difficult way at Love County, Oklahoma, where they were like by section and range and stuff.

Nicole (18m 37s):
So they had this one section, range section of books here and then another one there. And then they had, the city of Marietta had its own section of books. And so one of the set of the deeds that I needed were in the city of Marietta books. And so you just had to look in all these different sections,

Diana (18m 56s):
Right? And there’s no one-stop shopping. I mean, you have to go look through everything there to try to figure it all out. And I was so disappointed when I realized after I got home that the mortgage books were separate. And when I told my husband, he’s like, oh yeah, I saw mortgage books. And I thought, oh goodness, here I thought I was so prepared and doing such a good job and just totally missed those. So you know that that’s going to happen and we just have to accept that. But luckily we can call and since I have the exact record that I want them to look up, I’m sure it won’t be difficult to just have them go pull that and take a picture for me to find those records.

Nicole (19m 34s):
Right. And I even had to do that with Love County too, because even after going back three days, there was another thing I had missed and I, ’cause I had taken some pictures of the index pages and so I was comparing that and putting everything in my log.

Diana (19m 48s):
Yeah, it’s really good to take pictures of the index, right?

Nicole (19m 52s):
Except for at this county they told you not to. It was, Thank you, the rules there. And I didn’t know notice the signs and someone told me, but I had already taken a picture of this one. I’m just guessing that it was to protect privacy of living individuals. I don’t know.

Diana (20m 5s):
Oh, that would make sense. Yeah. Yeah. But for something in the early 1900s that probably was not as big of a deal.

Nicole (20m 13s):
Yeah. But anyway, I took the picture, I had that exact page and book I needed. And so asking someone to go get an exact deed that you know is there in the page and the volume is different than saying, can you go research my ancestor? You know, they don’t do that. Right, exactly. You won’t look at the index and try to figure out which one you want, but they, a lot of the time we’ll just go and get that exact item that you need. So that was cool.

Diana (20m 38s):
Yeah. So one of the things that you really need to do is to have a good system to track your research because once you get home, then you need to create the appropriate source citations. So what I did was I used the index books to find each record and I took a little notebook and a pencil and I would note the volume and page number. And you could do this in a printed research log as well. I could, it just so much easier to have a little notebook and jot those down. And then that became my mini research plan to find all those specific mentions. And then I went and found the record in the the right deed book.

Diana (21m 18s):
And then I took a picture of the cover of the book or the inside flap, or both, whichever seemed most appropriate. Then I photographed all the records from the book and then I was able to come home and then see exactly where each record came from. And as I completed each search, I marked it off my research log and made any notes that I needed.

Nicole (21m 38s):
That’s great. Yeah, I love that process. And I think if I had been like super organized and had like twice as much time, it would’ve been nice to do everything there at the courthouse. But the way that it was set up when I was there, there weren’t tables that I could work at. I just had to stand up. And so it just feels like there’s not a lot of space and time to like actually transcribe everything and like put it in your research log. So I also had to do a lot of that stuff at home. And so you’re basically just taking pictures of what you’ll need for your citations and for your analyzing things. One thing to check though is if you take pictures, like sometimes on your phone they can look fine, but then when you try to blow them up, you’ll see that they’re blurry.

Nicole (22m 22s):
And so I had to retake some pictures the next day because my pictures weren’t very good. So that’s another thing to be aware of, is to hold your phone really still and make sure you have good lighting to try to get really high quality images so that they’re not blurry. Well after you returned home, it’s good to pull out your research log and notebook and photographs of the records and then enter everything into your digital research log. So here’s a good process you can follow. Create the source citation in the research log for each record based on the photo of the book, cover the repository and the recorded event. Add the relevant information to the research log an abstract of the information, comments on the source, information evidence, that kind of thing.

Nicole (23m 6s):
Then download the image to the ancestors folder in Google Drive or on your hard drive of your computer and giving it file name. So the date, the record type the name locality, whatever your protocol is for naming files. And then attach the source citation to the front of the image using a program like Canva or some kind of Windows designer thing, whatever it is that you’re gonna use so that you can put that citation on the image.

Diana (23m 33s):
Right. I had some fun doing that. You know, it sounds a little tedious, but I really enjoyed getting those documents already because the last thing I wanted to do was to have those in my ancestors folder and then not remember where they came from or what they were. And so I just got my little system down and was able to get those all labeled correctly with the citation. And then, because sometimes, you know, I was looking at a really big record with a lot of names, I just did a little blue or yellow transparent highlighting of the actual record so that I could really quickly find what I wanted on that page. So that was a fun afternoon’s work and I felt very accomplished getting everything put into the folder.

Diana (24m 17s):
And so now that I have that, you know, the next thing or the last thing that we do is use those research findings. And so then if we have found additional information on our ancestor, we can add it to our any reports or research summaries we’ve written. And maybe we have answered our research question with that research trip, but we found a lot of new questions in our research. And so then we can let those findings guide our next research project. So you know, we may think that we are all done with that one trip to the courthouse, but we can always return just like you did Nicole. I would’ve liked another day or two. But we can always go back and I think the next time we will have learned and know a little bit more.

Diana (25m 2s):
And you know, it just comes with experience. It’s like the first time when you sat down to do microfilm, you didn’t know what you were doing and then you get better and better at it. So courthouse research I think is very similar. You get better and better as you continue trying and learning some lessons along the way.

Nicole (25m 17s):
Right. And it’s really fun to be there in the actual courthouse and to handle the old records. And so it can just be a bit overwhelming with just like the fun and the excitement and all of the things you want to look at. And so just know that you’re going to want to do more than you probably can. And allotting as much time as possible will be helpful.

Diana (25m 43s):
Exactly. Well, one final thing that I think is just kind of funny was I had my husband take a picture of me in front of these books and I’m wearing kind of an off-white sweater. One of my friends commented and said, I can’t believe you wore a white to to a courthouse, but I thought Alabama was going to be really hot and it was really cold and I had only had one sweater and so I had to, I had to dress for the day. So yeah, I would recommend everything was dusty and dirty and things were not, you know, nice and clean. So you definitely don’t wanna wear your best clothes to go researching. So luckily everything is washable.

Nicole (26m 19s):
Right. That reminds me of when I was looking at old textbooks behind the courthouse in Love County, Oklahoma, and it was dirty in there. There were dead crickets on top of a lot of the books. And it was not like a research room that was beautiful and nice. It was basically a storage closet kept in an old jail cell that they graciously allowed me to go in. And they just let me have access to all these old books that they were storing and, and there wasn’t anywhere to like put the books. I had to find like a plastic storage bin that I turned upside down and ’cause it was empty. And that’s where I put the books to be able to open them.

Nicole (26m 59s):
Otherwise I was just opening them up on the ground. And so the next day that I went back there to finish the tax research, I brought tennis shoes instead of sandals. And I did get dirty, my clothes got dirty. So it’s really good advice to wear clothes that you can get dirty. Yeah,

Diana (27m 17s):
And that’s just a another tip. Sometimes you are out in the old jail doing the research.

Nicole (27m 25s):
It was pretty cool. But

Diana (27m 27s):
That is actually very, very cool. Well, we hope everybody’s enjoyed listening to us talk about courthouse research and if you have never experienced this, we hope you’ll get a chance to go and check it out. So thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you next time. Bye-bye.

Nicole (27m 45s):
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.