RLP 369: Decoding the 1819 Weatherford Assault Case in Frontier Arkansas

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 369: Decoding the 1819 Weatherford Assault Case in Frontier Arkansas. 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.

Nicole (41s):
Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (50s):
Hi Nicole. How are you doing today?

Nicole (52s):
I’m doing great. As we’re recording this, my kids started back to school, so that’s exciting for them. They’re all really looking forward to the school year and my high schooler doesn’t start for another couple of days, but even my little preschooler started his first day of preschool

Diana (1m 8s):
And I bet he was very excited about that.

Nicole (1m 10s):
He was, it was very cute and there were a couple moments of being nervous, but he mostly was just really excited to be like his older siblings.

Diana (1m 18s):
Aw, that’s so great.

Nicole (1m 20s):
Our announcements today are that we have a fun webinar coming up for the Research Like a Pro Webinar Series and the presenter is a member of our FamilyLocket genealogist research team. Her name is Torhild Shirley and she is going to be teaching us about her ancestor. The lecture is called Tracing Karolius: Norwegian Research on a WWII Evacuee’s Journey. A little about this class, born in northern Norway, Karolius Martin Jacobsen Wessel spent most of his adult life in the coal mines on the island of Svalbard. During WWII, Germany’s need for coal made Svalbard a targeted area and a dangerous place to live.

Nicole (2m 2s):
Operation Gauntlet botched the German plans, and Karolius was evacuated. He never saw his family again. Research in Norway and Scotland revealed more about his life and evacuation. So this will be an interesting topic to explore. We’ll learn about Norwegian research and Church records, Census, Military records, Achival research and more about specific local records there. Torhild Shirley is a native Norwegian and an accredited genealogist professional and the owner of ScandinavianFamily.com. She has an associate’s degree in technical translation from the University of Agder in Norway and an associate’s degree in family history research from Brigham Young University – Idaho.

Nicole (2m 44s):
And she has over 30 years of research experience and speaks five languages and is fluent in all Scandinavian languages. And in addition to research, Torhild is comfortable with the old Gothic handwriting used in Scandinavian documents and can transcribe and translate documents as needed. So we’re really excited to learn more about Norwegian research with Torhild and if you have any research projects that you need in Scandinavian countries, let us know because Torhild is our expert in that. Our next Research Like a Pro study group, is beginning in August of 2025 this year coming up really soon, the end of this month and registration ends August 21st.

Nicole (3m 25s):
So make sure you sign up if you’re planning to join us and let us know if you’d like to be a peer group leader. Also, we have a newsletter that comes out every Monday with new posts that we’ve written, any videos we’ve recorded and put on YouTube any upcoming lectures and also sometimes coupon codes for special deals. And we have a couple conferences coming up that we’ll be going to. I will be speaking at the Association of Professional Genealogist PMC Professional Management Conference and that’s September 18th through the 20th. It’s virtual and my topic is Growing Your Online Reach with AI tools. So if you’re a genealogy business person and you wanna learn more about that, join us at that conference.

Nicole (4m 9s):
We will also both be attending the Texas State Genealogical Society conference on November 7th through 8th, which is also virtual. So that’s something else to look forward to. And I don’t believe registration has started for that yet, But we are planning on it. Okay, we have a listener spotlight today from Kira. Kira emailed me and said, “I don’t recall you mentioning the Handcart Trek reenactment on the podcast. I’d love to hear more about this in a future episode if you’re willing to share. It sounds like fun but also hard work.” So I thought I would answer Kira’s question today and actually we’ve both done HandCart Trek reenactments, right Mom?

Diana (4m 45s):
Yes, we have.

Nicole (4m 45s):
I remember, I think the first time anyone in our family did it was my brothers.

Diana (4m 50s):
Right. You didn’t do one in Seattle at the same time? No, that was here in Utah. That’s right.

Nicole (4m 54s):
Yeah. I never did one when I was a youth, only as an adult.

Diana (4m 59s):
That’s right. And I did one as a youth leader, you’re a ma and a pa over a group of youth. But then we also did one for a family reunion, just a little one day Handcart pull. So I’ve done those two. But then you’ve done, how many have you done now?

Nicole (5m 14s):
I’ve been a part of three Handcart Trek reenactments. Our area does it every four years here in Arizona. The first time I did it, Lance and I were a ma and a pa over a group of 10 youth from age 14 to 18. And so part of our job was just to like be in charge of the group and we had to prepare like by bringing a bunch of supplies for the group, like the cooking supplies and some of the camping tents and things like that. We all had to wear pioneer clothes. So the trek that we were reenacting was the 1856 Mormon Pioneer Trek from Illinois all the way over to the Salt Lake Valley in Utah.

Nicole (5m 57s):
So this particular year they started using Handcarts to carry all of the supplies, sorry, it’s Council Bluffs, Iowa, not Illinois. So it was from Council Bluffs over to Salt Lake and they went through like Wyoming and stuff. So when we went for our one day Handcart Trek reenactment with grandma that was in Wyoming. So that was a neat thing to do. And the pulling of the handcarts, it isn’t too difficult because there’s so many people helping. So usually there would be like two teenagers in the front and three in the back pushing. And if we had to go up a hill, we would get out a rope and a another two could go in the front and pull up that way.

Nicole (6m 43s):
And going downhill was a bit challenging because you had to slow the cart down so it wouldn’t run away from you. So we put some ropes behind to help with that. But it was really neat and everyone brought buckets they could sit on and keep their stuff inside. And so the buckets had like cushion top lids that you could screw on. And then we put those buckets in the handcart and then for this particular year we camped at the same spot each night just to make it a little easier and not have to move all of the camping gear. So that was interesting. And it was two nights and three days of handcart trekking. But I’m, my favorite part is always the clothing. I think it’s so fun to wear pioneer dresses and look the part.

Nicole (7m 26s):
And it’s also fun to cook our food together, you know, over the camp stove. And the food isn’t really like historically accurate, we just try to have plenty of good food for the teenagers to be happy and not be grumpy. But we try to talk a lot about our ancestors and encourage anyone who has ancestors who were part of the handcart treks to talk about theirs. And so it’s, it’s neat to learn about the, the people in the past who were part of that handcart trek and it’s part of our church and so it’s just a neat part of our history to do together. And one of the dresses that I wore, I sewed like eight years ago on my first Handcart Trek. So that was fun to get out again.

Nicole (8m 9s):
And I had a skirt that I sewed, I bought a new apron this year that was white and it got completely dirty the first day and realized, oh yeah, white aprons aren’t really practical for hiking. So that would’ve been one I could’ve saved for my evening wear, which would’ve been smarter, but it’s okay.

Diana (8m 28s):
Yes. That’s so funny. That exact same thing happened to me because we had rain on our first day, So it, the trail was muddy and I had a white apron that I’d actually borrowed from a friend and I leaned up against one of those wheels to get something outta the hand cart and then just got covered in the mud. I felt so bad then I was just had this dirty apron the whole time. But yeah, that’s a good idea. Just say those for the evening when you’re dressing up a little bit.

Nicole (8m 57s):
Right? Yeah, they’re so cute. I think they bring the whole outfit together to have the white like, full apron. The rest of the time I wore a half apron that I had that was dark blue with white polka dots and I had some like really lightweight, comfy long sleeve shirts to keep the sun off. Luckily we had a lot of cloud cover so it wasn’t too hot. It was high eighties, low nineties most of the time. We had a lot of water. We were really good. We drank a lot of liquid IVs and just tried to keep everyone hydrated and everyone stayed really healthy and we didn’t have any issues, but we were definitely concerned about it being hot here in Arizona in May. So we just did our best to hydrate and then we got lucky that it was nice and cloudy.

Diana (9m 39s):
That is so great. Well it’s so fun to do these. Yesterday we had, not your children, but my son’s children over and they had been singing a song in church. They taught the children this song about pri pioneer children saying as they walked and walked and walked. Maybe you remember that song. And my little five-year-old granddaughter was singing that and I said, you know that you have a great-great-great-great grandma who walked and was a pioneer. And she said, really? And so I showed her a picture of Sarah Jane Miller that you researched a lot. She was in the very first handcart company. And I said, yep, this grandma came over when she was just young and walked all the way across the plane.

Diana (10m 20s):
So you know, it’s really fun to know a little bit about our family history ’cause you never know when it’s gonna pop up in your conversation with one of your children or grandchildren.

Nicole (10m 31s):
Yeah, that’s so fun. I love that song. And I also loved learning about Sarah Jane Miller Creer and I remember that’s one of the first people that Grandma Shults introduced me to in her family. I remember she would talk about her great-great-grandmother who was a handcart pioneer and she would show us different stories about her and, and it sparked one of my first research projects to learn about her and understand her family that she left behind. Well if anyone listening wants to read more about the history of the Handcarts, this unique western migration that happened in 1856 and continued until 1860, although 1856 had the most companies I think.

Nicole (11m 13s):
But there’s a book that I read before the first handcart trek reenactment that I did eight years ago. It’s by Anne and Leroy Hafen, H-A-F-E-N, and it’s called Handcarts to Zion, the story of a Unique Western Migration 1856 to 1860. So that’s a valuable book with a lot of historical details and original accounts of the people who participated.

Diana (11m 37s):
Yeah, that’s a great book. I had forgotten about that one, but that’s a good one. I think I have that on my shelf.

Nicole (11m 43s):
I think I have two accidentally.

Diana (11m 47s):
Well that’s neat. I’m glad you had a good experience and all went well. Well let’s get to our topic for the day, which is all about finding and using court records with AI. So court records are one of the record types that can be so very valuable in our family history. But up until FamilySearch’s new Full Text Search, it’s been really hard to find them because usually they’re not indexed. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and someone in the county will have gone through those and created a book of abstracts. I found those a few times, but generally you have to in the day, back in the day, either scroll through the microfilm or scroll through the digital images.

Diana (12m 30s):
But when in Full Text Search came along, that really changed things. And then of course we also had the challenge of transcribing the court records. Sometimes they’re challenging because they are abbreviated because the court recorder is just trying to get the information down really easily, I guess. And so sometimes they put in weird abbreviations and then of course there is the whole thing about understanding what is going on because of legal terminology or just different terms back in the day that they would use. So luckily we now have these great new artificial intelligence tools that can really help us, that can be our assistant to get into these records and find more.

Diana (13m 14s):
So in my recent project I was working on the father of Henderson Weatherford and it led me to a whole new county, which I love it when I find a new place to research. And this was Lawrence County, Arkansas and the court records and I was able to find somebody I had not known about before, an unknown Weatherford individual. And it’s always exciting in a really significant brick wall to find somebody else that you can research and that you can work with. So let’s first of all talk a little bit about Full Text Search. And we have talked about that before on the podcast and I am just such a fan of Full Text Search.

Diana (13m 55s):
So hopefully everybody listening has gone to FamilySearch and tried that. You find it on the homepage, you have to go to the the FamilySearch labs. It’s one of the experiments. But you can also probably just do a Google search for Full Text Search and find it. And once you find it, you wanna do a bookmark so you can always get back to it really quickly. So Henderson Weatherford, as I said, has been a subject of a lot of my research lately because he has been such a brick wall. And I turned to DNA in the spring as part of our Research Like a Pro with DNA study group and I had just previously disproved the Texas family, the Dallas County WeatherFords as being part of his family.

Diana (14m 41s):
And so then in this project I wanted to go back to Arkansas and see if I could test a new hypothesis. So here’s my objective: using DNA and documentary evidence, test the hypothesis that William Weatherford of Izard County, Arkansas is the father of Henderson Weatherford. William was born 1780 to 1790 and was present on the 1830 census of Izard County. Henderson was born about 1815 in Tennessee and died about 1862 in Dallas County, Texas. He married Clemsy Cline about 1838 in Izard County, Arkansas. So one of the challenges of this was that Izard County is a severely burned county.

Diana (15m 23s):
And so all the usual records that we would want to use to figure out parentage, such as probate and marriage and deeds, none of those existed at the time these Weatherfords were living there. But luckily I had found tax records that had been sent to the state and those survived the county courthouse burning of course, ’cause they weren’t there. And so there was on this tax list this William Weatherford who was present the same time as Henderson and he was the only man that could have been old enough to be a father from Henderson from what I could tell, and so I thought, well let’s just go after William and see if we can find any connections to him.

Diana (16m 9s):
So in this phase of the project, I was doing locality research and I found that Izard County was created from Independence County. So that was its parent county. But then Independence was created from Lawrence County. So we have a grandparent county and I was excited to see that these two counties could be researched and there was a series of court records in Lawrence County that I could use and that was exciting. And using FamilySearch’s Full Text Search I found that there was an entry for William, and then some for a man named Booman or Bunion, and it looks like that’s what it is in several of the records.

Diana (16m 53s):
The name is written and I can’t decide which it is. But anyway, he’s now Booman/Bunion. So previously I had never heard of this individual and I had no idea that there was, you know, another county that I should research. So that is part of the value of this locality research, finding the parents and the grandparents sometimes of our locality.

Nicole (17m 19s):
That is so wonderful. I just love how you walked us through the process of doing locality research, realizing that the Burn County had a parent and grandparent county that you could then use for county level research because they weren’t burned counties. So it’s exciting. And then I just love Booman, Booman, that name is, I just, I’m kind of waiting on pins and needles to learn more about Booman/Bunion.

Diana (17m 45s):
Oh gosh, I know that name. It’s crazy, isn’t it? It’s a fun one.

Nicole (17m 51s):
So it’ll be great to see what you conclude about what his name is. Well, let’s have a word from our Sponsor. Ever wondered what life was really like for your ancestors? With Newspapers.com you can explore the world they lived in through their eyes, in their time. Search over a billion newspaper pages dating from 1690 to 2025 and uncover the stories that shaped your family’s past from birth and wedding announcements to obituaries and community news. These pages hold the milestones and everyday moments that connect you to your roots, but it’s more than names and dates, it’s about standing in their shoes. Picture reading the local paper your great grandmother once held or stumbling on a forgotten article about your grandfather’s first business.

Nicole (18m 32s):
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Diana (18m 55s):
Alright, well Thank you for that. Well, Full Text Search found five court records that I wanted to look through for this Weatherford group there in Lawrence County. And so of course the next step is to transcribe each one and Family Search Full Text Search does give you a transcription on the sidebar and a summary and that can be really helpful to quickly look and determine if it’s your ancestor. But in this case it completely missed the record for Booman Weatherford. The court book, you know, has lines and it has little sections and I think it just, just didn’t quite get that one. So I turned to Claude.AI, one of my favorite large language models to transcribe the Weatherford entries in this court docket book.

Diana (19m 44s):
And I wanted to have AI keep all the line breaks and transcribe every single detail. So I created a pretty good prompt for that so I could get it the first time to do what I wanted. So here was my prompt. I wrote, you are an expert genealogist skilled at reading handwriting from the early 1800s, I provided an image of a record from a court docket book, transcribe the record, preserving the line breaks, place any unknown words in square brackets. So then I gave it a screenshot of the court record and had it transcribed. And then of course I had to check for accuracy. And in this case where some of the words were abbreviated, a little bit difficult to read, it was even more important to make sure that that transcription was as accurate as possible.

Diana (20m 36s):
And sometimes, you know, there will be something that’s inaccurate and I’ll just ask the AI to make the correction. And in this case I also asked Claude AI to interpret the record. So that was great because this is a difficult era to understand what is going on and with the extended thinking that it can do, it could ponder the document and give me some ideas. And so at first it had a little bit of an error, you know, it didn’t realize it was an assault and battery case. It thought it was an action battery and you know, I had to reply and say no, this is an assault and battery case and then it, then it figured it out.

Diana (21m 20s):
So you know, in this case it’s really us working with the AI, it’s our assistant, But we have to be right there with it, making sure we’re getting everything accurate.

Nicole (21m 31s):
That’s so true. You know, we have to catch those things earlier or else we’ll get off down the wrong track and misunderstand the record. So great job transcribing that with AI and working together with it. It’s funny looking at the Boomin or Bunion word there, it really could be either because if it’s an I, if it’s B-U-M-I-O-N, it could be B-U-N-I-O-N could be Bunion, but if that’s an M

Diana (21m 60s):
Boom right?

Nicole (21m 60s):
I guess it looks more like an M to me now, but who knows? Yeah, well I love that it can give you an idea of what’s happening in the court case and so often trying to understand these older legal actions or even present day legal legalese is challenging. And so this is just such a great usage for AI to give you some ideas for what’s happening and what these legal phrases mean that you can then verify elsewhere. But it’s just so helpful to understand the whole court case and get an overarching like bird’s eye view and then also get a detailed understanding of what each little minute entry means.

Nicole (22m 41s):
So it looks like there were five separate entries in the court docket books for this case. So what a great idea that you had to create a Google doc where you could put each transcription. And then once all of those were in the document, then you have everything in one place that you can then analyze with AI. Just uploading that as a as a PDF or copy and pasting the whole thing into Claude AI. However you do it, either way works great and then after uploading that document to AI you can then ask it to explain the entire case. So that’s such a great method for working with any kind of source that we find that spans many documents such as a pension estate file or in this case a court case.

Nicole (23m 31s):
So once the transcriptions were complete, Diana asked Claude to use the Google Doc and provide an explanation of the proceedings and then she made a couple of corrections and asked for the summary to be chronological and the result was an understandable description of the court case. So that’s so helpful. So should we talk about this and just kind of go through it?

Diana (23m 54s):
Yeah, let’s do, I think it’s such an interesting case and it kind of will help everyone listening to to see what, what I’m up against now, trying to figure out what’s going on with this family.

Nicole (24m 8s):
Okay, March 20th, 1819 Capias, and then we have in parentheses arrest warrant, issued for William Wilson and Buman Weatherford. March 22nd, 1819, William Wilson and Buman Weatherford indicted by the United States for assault and battery on Levi Gentry. Grand jury returned “a true bill” and then in parentheses we have the explanation, found sufficient evidence for prosecution. Then July term 1819 judgment entered for assault and battery on Levi Gentry. Sheriff returned an alias and then in parentheses, second writ, against Wilson.

Nicole (24m 51s):
Then November 24th, 1819, Benjamin Weatherford failed to appear in court despite being ordered to do so. So does that mean that they’re going back and forth between Booman and Benjamin? Maybe Booman’s a nickname for Benjamin

Diana (25m 5s):
Maybe because I saw that and I still haven’t quite decided the handwriting is so poor and at first I just thought for sure it was Benjamin but then some of it is clearly Booman and so I maybe that is the deal, maybe it is Benjamin and then that is a nickname. No, the name is still just bothering me. I haven’t, I haven’t figured that one out yet for sure.

Nicole (25m 30s):
That’s so interesting. Yeah, well it seems like the same guy ’cause it’s just a few months later and they’re saying he failed to appear in court despite being ordered to do so. But I guess he could be like a, a witness if it’s a separate person. True. But let’s keep rating, let’s keep rating. So the court ordered forfeiture of Weatherford’s recognizance bond and John Gilbert Weatherford’s security or bondsman was held liable. And then we have Scire facias ordered against Benjamin Weatherford and John Gilbreath and an alias warrant issued against William Wilson. So that doesn’t ever mention Booman. So it kind of makes it seem like in November that they’re using the name Benjamin for Boomin, but who knows.

Diana (26m 19s):
Right, right.

Nicole (26m 21s):
Okay. Then December 4th, 1819 payment made by Wilson and then we have some months go by and then we’re in March 29th, 1820 and it says Pluries, which in parentheses is explained as third or subsequent, Pluries writ awarded against William Wilson and Scire facias case against Buneon spelled B-U-N-E-O-N, Buneon Weatherford continued to next term. Then we have William Weatherford, possibly a relative, served as juror in unrelated Boran vs. Plott case. So that was interesting to, we have throw that in there with another Weatherford appearing and I think that’s good because then you can catch, you know, any instance of the name Weatherford in all these court minutes.

Nicole (27m 10s):
And make sure you’re not missing anything. Then March 30th, 1820, the court continued a session from the previous day and then April 20th, 1820 additional payment made by Wilson. July 29th, 1830, so 10 years later, I wonder if that was a transcription error ’cause I’m guessing it’s 1820.

Diana (27m 34s):
Oh probably

Nicole (27m 34s):
Scire facias case against Weatherford & Gilbreath continued until next term.

Diana (27m 39s):
Right. Well you know, and as we were reading through that, I just realized there’s so much more for future research because look at all those different names now to research this William Wilson and especially this Gilbreath who turns out to be somehow related because he was putting up bond. Not to mention just Benjamin/Bunion Booman, whoever this other Weatherford is and this Levi Gentry. I mean there’s a lot of different people now to research, which is great because that’s what we want to do. We want to expand that FAN club, all the associates of our people to try to learn more about them. So one of the things that AI did help was giving me some notes on the terminology.

Diana (28m 25s):
So it said for assault and battery, that is a criminal charge for threatening and physically harming someone, well yeah, I knew that one. That one wasn’t too hard, but I didn’t know what the True Bill meant, and that was the Grand Jury’s formal indictment. So that was helpful to know. And then the Capias had no idea of that C-A-P-I-A-S, which is a arrest warrant, and then the Alias/Pluries writs, which was second and subsequent writs when earlier ones fail. That was a good explanation. And then I had no idea that recognizance meant a court bond, and then the Scire facias, a writ demanding someone show cause against judgment.

Diana (29m 8s):
Execution. So of course I would want to do additional research on all those terms and understand those more. But for a first go at this court case, this really helped me to understand a little bit more about what was going on. And I thought it was interesting that the AI caught the idea that there was this name inconsistency. So it said Booman/Benjamin /Buneon Weatherford likely represents clerical variations rather than different individuals as was common in historical records. So that’s interesting too that maybe, you know, maybe it is Benjamin and it was a long name to write and so he was just abbreviating.

Diana (29m 50s):
So I’m, I’m still unsure. So regardless of the name, it’s another Weatherford present in the area with William who was a juror during the same time. So it was nice to have William show up there that same time, so I could know, you know, yeah, he’s living there, maybe he’s a brother, could he be an older brother to my Henderson? You know, is he a son? So maybe tracing these two men back to Illinois or Tennessee, which are some of the hints that I have from William’s presumed sons, I could move that Weatherford line back, you know, ’cause William Weatherford is pretty common name and so if I can find a Benjamin and a William together in the same place, that would be awesome.

Diana (30m 36s):
So that will be what I’m crossing my fingers for.

Nicole (30m 41s):
That would be great. And I still think that Boomin is like a, a nickname. I feel like nicknames were pretty common at this place in time for, especially for Southerners and maybe they just called him Boomin.

Diana (30m 54s):
It could have been like a little kid nickname. Right. That just ended up sticking with him. You know, we, yeah,

Nicole (31m 1s):
Like somebody couldn’t pronounce Benjamin like a brother that’s a name or himself. Booman, Booman.

Diana (31m 10s):
Yeah, I agree. I, I think that makes perfect sense. So, or

Nicole (31m 13s):
Like you said, it could be the clerks just being like, oh I’m gonna shorten this instead of writing out Benjamin, I’m just gonna write.

Diana (31m 20s):
Yeah. It’s too long to write out

Nicole (31m 22s):
Something else. Yeah.

Diana (31m 24s):
Yep, yep. Because when you look at the, the images and you know, for anybody who’s listening, you can go look at the blog posts that I wrote about this and see some of the images and you can see that he’s, the court record’s just trying to abbreviate a lot of different things. Like for sheriff he does SHFF and for assault it was just A, and then you know the, what they used for the double S, it kind of looks like a P but it looks like a PL, but we know it’s for assault and battery, it’s just B-A-T-T-Y. I mean he really was abbreviating a lot, so maybe he did the same thing with the names, William is always abbreviated as Wm and yeah,

Nicole (32m 8s):
But that’s pretty funny way to abbreviate Benjamin. I mean, yeah, it clearly does not say like BENJ like you would expect.

Diana (32m 18s):
True, very true.

Nicole (32m 18s):
Definitely. Like,

Diana (32m 19s):
Yeah, it’s different. Something I haven’t seen before

Nicole (32m 22s):
Looks, looks like Boomin. I don’t see any descenders going down for anything. So they just like didn’t do the J or yeah…

Diana (32m 30s):
Well it’s fun, it’s, it was exciting and it was really great to find another location to research and to find records. I found that in these really early times, like at the beginning of a county, this was 1820, you know, this was really early that court records sometimes are the only place where you find your, your person. Often taxes too but for some reason they had a lot of things going on in the court. And so a lot of times people are listed in those court records. Sometimes they’re just jurors, you know, they’re on a jury, which is great. And we’ve also had our ancestors listed in being in charge of building the road.

Diana (33m 11s):
But I think the court was just where everything was taking place. It’s where everything was happening, you know, all, all the little problems as well as the work getting the county going. It had to all be done legally. And so, you know, find a lot of people in this court records. So having it on Full Text Search now is amazing and really game changing for us.

Nicole (33m 30s):
Yes it is. I love finding these court records. It adds so much interest to our ancestors’ lives as well, just to understand what was happening the in the community and you can find so many interesting things in the court minutes. So it’s wonderful that they’re so much more accessible now and we can find people that we have been stuck on in those records. Hooray.

Diana (33m 55s):
Exactly, exactly. So we still don’t know why, you know, Booman and William Wilson assaulted poor Levi Gentry, But we do know they were found guilty of it and they were, they were supposed to appear in court and they didn’t do that. And so, you know, there was something going on there. But sometimes that’s the other thing about court records, They leave you hanging because you, you learn all this and then you don’t see anything else. It’s just kind of over with. So, right.

Nicole (34m 19s):
Well I don’t know, were they found guilty yet or they just found sufficient evidence for prosecution.

Diana (34m 24s):
Yeah, there you go. That’s what it was.

Nicole (34m 25s):
And then they, I am left hanging, I wanna know where they found guilty. So we gotta find out the rest of this if we can. And sometimes you can’t, they don’t have any more mentions of it. So, or maybe they just spell the name Weatherford differently and it didn’t get picked up by full text search so it’d be interesting to follow this forward in time and see what happened.

Diana (34m 45s):
Right. Because the final entry, and I agree with you, it must, it’s gotta be 1820, that’s, that must be a transcription error. But the final thing was this Scire facias, whatever that is in which was a writ demanding someone show cause against judgment execution. So it sounds like perhaps there’s just not really any proof they’re wanting some additional proof that there was something that happened just cause does that make sense? Is that kind of what it seems like to you?

Nicole (35m 16s):
I’m just looking it up for more details, but it sounds like this is a type of writ used in civil law and the Latin term means that you make known, so they want to show cause why a particular action should not be taken against them. So it just sounds like their defense I guess.

Diana (35m 36s):
I don’t know. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. Well obviously I have more research to do. This was the very, very end of my project and I was out of time. So this will definitely carry into the next phase of research to follow these people, follow this case and see what else I can find. But it was exciting at the end of a project, often that happens at the end of a project, all of a sudden we find something great. So that was fun.

Nicole (36m 4s):
Yeah, it sounds like they were supposed to pay, I think, it sounds like, don’t you think? It sounds like they were probably fined or something and they were supposed to pay, but then they hadn’t paid. And so somebody was supposed to say, well I don’t wanna pay and here’s why. And that’s what the writ was supposed to be for.

Diana (36m 21s):
Yeah, well this William Wilson did pay, said there was a payment made by him December, 1819 and so maybe, maybe Benjamin/Bunion was the one that wasn’t paying. Yeah,

Nicole (36m 36s):
Our Weatherford person isn’t paying his fine. Yeah, whatever. So we don’t get all the details sadly, but I wonder if it’s like those court case files in Kentucky when we were there for the state library and archives. So you can see the minutes, but like if you wanna see the actual case files, you can order those from their, their record fault, which was actually upstairs. But I just wonder like maybe there’s a, an actual case file somewhere for this

Diana (37m 0s):
That would be nice to look into and that can be future research. I have found that sometimes it, it really is just these docket books, that’s all that’s left. You know, the other items would’ve been loose papers and sometimes those are the ones that get tossed. You would hope that they wouldn’t, and maybe they’re at the state archives or who knows where and maybe maybe not. Maybe they were just taking down these minutes day to day and that’s all there is to it. It was pretty early. It was pretty early. It was on the frontier.

Nicole (37m 32s):
Yeah. Which is why probably they have so many things going on in the courts because it is the wild west frontier at the time. So anyway, well it’s fun to learn about these early court records and it definitely gives us a lot of future research to do, not only in the people that we wanna research, but understanding what all this means. So it’s definitely a process. So finding it and transcribing it and getting, you know, this original interpretation of what some of these words mean and then continuing to research going forward in your next phase. It’ll be neat to see kind of what you can get from additional records to round it out.

Nicole (38m 12s):
And if you can’t find anything else, just to see, you know, all the legal contextual research that you can do to really make sense of this further. So it’ll be neat.

Diana (38m 23s):
Right. Well one of the things that we really haven’t mentioned was in each one of these entries into the court docket book, sometimes it would have two or three dates put in there. You know, like they were recording things that had happened in the the past as well. And so when I did the transcription and then asked AI to do the chronological order, that was really helpful because then it took kind of that, it was kind of jumbled all the dates and items together. And So it was helpful to have it, you know, separated out and give it to me in chronological order. So, you know, AI can be really helpful in a lot of things and in this case it was.

Diana (39m 4s):
It was super helpful.

Nicole (39m 5s):
Fantastic. Well thanks for sharing that with us today. It was neat to hear about the great find you had at the end of your research project and how AI helped you with transcribing it and understanding it, so that’s really great.

Diana (39m 18s):
Yeah. Well thanks for talking it over with me. It was so fun. Well, thanks everyone for listening and we hope you can go find some court records or use some full text search and have fun. So thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you next time. Bye-bye.

Nicole (39m 33s):
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.