Town Equals County (or Counties)

When you want to research your ancestors who lived in a particular town, you should be thinking right away about finding out which county or counties that town has been a part of over the years. Then explore county-oriented research sites online, like bulletin boards for genealogical queries and databases for vital statistics, cemetery records, land records, wills, and Bible inscriptions. If county records are sparse, turn to regional sites, then state sites.

According to certain shakey late-nineteenth century records, my Carr ancestors might have had their roots in the Manahawkin section of Stafford Township, New Jersey. Manahawkin has been part of Ocean County since 1850, but before that it was in Monmouth County. (Stafford Township was formed out of Shrewsbury Township in 1750.) Since I've been able to trace my Carr line back to Greenwich, New Jersey in Gloucester County, per tax records from the 1780s and Revolutionary War service records, I figure those Carr roots in Manahawkin must predate the Revolution. So, when I research my Carr line, I focus on Monmouth County research sites. I keep Ocean County in mind, however, because queries about a particular town can easily end up in the "wrong" county's bulletin board.

My wife's Pool ancestors (her grandmother's great uncle was US Senator John Pool 1826-1884) lived in Elizabeth City and environs before the Civil War. I did a bit of digging tonight for websites handling Pasquotank County. The USGenWeb Archives has a nice collection of resources. There's USGenNet, which has quite a few useful links. NCGenWeb has some links but looks to be needing volunteers. And NCRoots hasn't quite discovered Pasquotank County yet. (It hedges its bets by including historic Albemarle County, which for four years in the 1660s included present-day Pasquotank County.) Linkpendium might be helpful to some, but as the name implies, it is just a linking service. Maybe if you don't have Google you'll want to keep Linkpendium handy?

Continuing with this Elizabeth City line of discussion: If you want to actually meet other researchers and dig around in records, you might try the Family Research Society of Northeastern North Carolina (FRSNNC), which is based in Elizabeth City. My wife and I visited the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh back in the 1980s. They have a wonderful facility and tons of records. The state archives were loaded on a wagon and hauled to safety before the Yankees burned the town during the Civil War. The place, which has some of the oldest records in the South, is now understandably quite fire resistant. It looks like their online resources might be substantial as well.

Rootsweb has a town search engine. It can be helpful when you need some leads on where to look or if you just want to browse when you've run out of ideas. And if you have no luck with county or regional records, you can always check Rootsweb's State Resources List. Once you click on a state, it takes you to a page with a veritable cornucopia of links. Here's the North Carolina page, for example. If the list is unwieldy, try using Ctl F to search the page for keywords, like a county name or town or surname.