Hello and welcome back to the blog! Today we will be taking a short break from talking about the different documents and evidences you can use in genealogy and instead focusing on a topic that may get you out and moving. In fact, it may inspire a quick road trip! Perhaps you have even tired of sorting through information regarding your ancestor and you have found that you cannot quite locate where they lived. Do not worry, this is not a rare occurrence in genealogy and this leads us directly into our topic of discussion today! It might mean that your ancestor lived in what is now considered a ghost town!
You might be confused as to why exactly you have not been able to find your ancestor’s town. How did a once thriving town become a ghost town? This is a valid question and you might find some of the reasons surprising. Some common reasons you may find include: erosion, lack of raw materials to supply the main trade (boom/bust), and political changes that may have caused charters to run out or led to the combining of towns), eviction, and railroad sites. All of these might lead towns that once existed in your ancestor’s time to simply disappear off later and more modern maps.
Now as much as you may be tired of compiling documents, that is indeed what most of our time as genealogists is spent doing. As such I am sure you are eager to hear how you might recover documentation about your ancestors that these towns might have kept. However, how do you recover records, if the town they were kept in does not even exit? Luckily, we live in a great time to be a genealogist where a myriad of ways via the internet can help us unearth these records. Of course, you can try the tried-and-true databases, but you may be unsure of what to look for. Some helpful hints I try to keep in mind is looking for county and state records that may have survived, deeds, wills, and state gazetteers. However, if you are still not finding much luck in ways of internet search, I am always an advocate for a good genealogy-based road trip to locate some records. See some of my previous blogs on locating records, like court-house records, for tips on how to best make use of your time and place as your road-trip.
I hope that this blog has at the very least pointed you in a better direction if you were struggling to understand why you could not locate a particular ancestor’s records or town. If you have further questions on this topic or any others previously covered in blogs, please check out my webinars located on this same website under the webinars tab. There I provide videos that go more in-depth into these topics and others like it. If there is a topic I have yet to cover there or in blogs like this one, please feel free to reach out to me directly using the contact information to the top right of this website. Stay tuned for future blogs and happy researching!
Winona I Laird – “The Genealogy Granny”
