Tuesday's Tip - And That Is Why It Is Called Research

Sherlock Holmes, source: Pixabay

It looked like a good day for staying home and doing some online research. Dreary afternoon, temperature dropping, rain alternating with snow. Time to seriously look for marriage records for some ancestors and relatives, all of whom had lived in or near Elbert County, Georgia.

I had already tried the usual places. For me, this meant starting with the Marriage Records on Microfilm collection on Georgia's Virtual Vault. The only problem was that the earliest records posted there for Elbert County started with 1835, later than the time period I needed. I hadn't been able to find marriage records I was seeking on either Ancestry's collections of early United States Marriage Records or on similar databases available on FamilySearch.org.

Previously I had used the unindexed probate records available on FamilySearch.org to locate information that wasn't available on Ancestry's indexed collections. Looking over the FamilySearch links to 30 image only record collections for Georgia, I saw a collection of records from Elbert County, Georgia. This collection dated back to the 1790s and included church, cemetery, school, and vital records collections. The Vital Records collection was labeled by year, making it easy to search for specific years as needed.

Georgia, Elbert County Records, 1790-2002
www.familysearch.org

Each box of records contained an average of 450-500 records. Soon after I started looking for familiar names, I realized that I did not need to look at every record in the collection, One image would be of the front of the record, such as this marriage record for Dozier Brown and Polly Herndon.

Since this was the marriage license for a relative, I would then look at the next image to see the back of the license. Had this not been the license for a relative, I would have skipped from image 16 to image 18 and read the next new license.

Two other factors were part of my search in these early 1800s marriage licenses. It turned out that the specific document for a marriage license changed through the years. As I moved from box to box of licenses, I could adjust where a new type of license appeared on my screen, then succeeding license images would show up centered on my screen and easy to read, with only minimal adjustment to view the image.

The second factor lead me to look at the names of both the groom and the bride on each license image I viewed. It didn't matter that most boxes of licenses were arranged alphabetically by groom's name. I needed to also look for a bride's name on the image. Looking at each license became particularly important in cases where the license was followed by a marriage bond record which just might include the name of the bride's father.

The whole process took most of the afternoon and a few cups of hot tea, but it was worthwhile. I recorded the years I had searched on my Research Log so I won't accidentally go through this process again. I ended up locating several marriage records, some new to my research, others the original source for information previously seen only in a database.

My takeaway tip was to spend more time going through other potentially helpful image-only records. Once you get accustomed to the record format, it becomes easier to skim over the image and locate names, dates, locations on a record. Admittedly it does involve looking at a number of screens, but it pays off when you locate a nugget of new information. Just as all genealogy information is not digitized and online, neither is all online information indexed. So many records can be accessed only by searching through them yourself. After all, this searching reminds us why it is called research.