When planning a summer vacation or other travel, try to include a visit to an ancestor’s home area.
If you can’t go in person, you can make a virtual trip by using online resources.
Whichever way you choose to explore, there are many things to learn, like the geography and terrain of the area. Where are the rivers and other water courses mentioned in deeds? Were they county boundaries? If so, check both counties for records.
What churches are still nearby? Who has their records? Locate the county historian or the local history expert. Is there a local genealogy room or perhaps a historical society with records, or even a county courthouse with a separate archives area?
What has been published? A county history or a journal by the local genealogical group can contain great records.
Online, you can check the various maps available on Google Earth or Street View if you have an address. USgenweb has a free site for every county in the United States, and some of them contain great treasures, as well as lists of local books and contacts.
It helps to know the county creation dates and the parent county, because your ancestors could have lived on the same ground but been in several counties over the years, each of which might have records on them.
Always check to see what records could be at a state archives that might not be at the local level, like the estate records moved from the courthouses to the North Carolina Archives in Raleigh, a lot of which are now online via the archives and familysearch.org.
Doing your homework first makes the trip more useful and productive.
DeKalb County deeds
A. Bruce Pruitt has published “Abstracts of Deeds, DeKalb County, GA, Books M & N (1850-1854),” which brings the deeds up to the splitting off of Fulton County in 1853. He previously published a volume covering Books H and L (1842-1852).
Pruitt includes brief, basic data from each deed, as well as cross references in the indexes — besides names — to the land lots and other parcel numbers. This is an important addition to metro Atlanta source material.
The softcover volume is available for $20.70 postpaid from A.B. Pruitt, P.O. Box 815, Whitakers, NC 27891. He also has published land records for North and South Carolina. For these and other books, see abpruitt.tripod.com or search for ABP Abstracts.
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