Back in Time Column: Following the bunny trail of family research

One of my favorite sayings is, “You can have all of the information in the world, but without a way to access it, what good does it do you?” At the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center, we have loads of information, much of it indexed, but getting started can be the challenging part.

Recently, we had a patron in to look for family history. This particular patron was looking for information about three people, all of whom went by various spellings of their middle names. The surname was distinctive and did not have a lot of spelling variations, so that was helpful, and we had dates of birth and death for them pretty well established.

Regardless, we started online with the resources Findagrave.com, billiongraves.com and ancestry.com, free at many libraries and research sites. Familysearch.org is the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints’ free service, although it requires registration for a free account. All of them are what I consider a good start — most of their contributors are volunteers, so the quality of the information varies — but gathering information from several sources and recording what each site says is important. That way, you can pick up the research thread later as you chase various lines.

On findagrave.com, we found pictures of the ancestors’ headstones and lists of family relationships. Sometimes, an obituary is included, too, but no such luck on this one. Findagrave entries also sometimes include an image of the deceased’s death certificate, if they died in Missouri more than 50 years ago. Death certificates are available for free viewing on the Missouri Secretary of State’s website; I usually just head to my favorite search engine and type in “Missouri death certificates,” and it pops up.

In this case, we found death certificates for two of the three people — the third died in Illinois, so a different process needs to go through the Illinois government to request a genealogical copy of that death certificate.

Since we had pretty well established the names the patron’s ancestors had gone by, we could then look at marriage records to find a marriage date, which we did.

We then looked at the probate, or estate papers, index, which showed one ancestor had left a will. Sometimes, a file on the estate is included in the court record, and sometimes not. In this case, it was not.

If the ancestors had lived in the city of Cape Girardeau, we could have looked through our collection of city directories to see if we could find an address for them. City directories often list occupations and other members of the household, too.

Some families have a family history book in the county’s Genealogical Society library, which we house at the Archive Center. These are listed alphabetically in the library index. This family name was not listed in those histories.

If we know an ancestor’s religion, we can check the volumes of church record transcriptions to see if they’re mentioned. Again, we didn’t have that information.

We have transcribed records of land records, or deeds, from the late 1700s to 1850, and those can tell us whether an ancestor owned land and where and who the witnesses were — often family members or neighbors. This particular ancestor wasn’t quite old enough to have purchased land during that time frame, but his name was listed on the 1901 county plat map showing large landowners’ names.

This patron left with a packet of information, marked with the source, so it’s findable again in the future — and with more information on his family’s history.

Marybeth Niederkorn is the director of the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center in Jackson and holds various leadership positions dedicated to preserving and furthering the county’s rich history.