Sometimes, a person’s genealogy research can feel more like a mystery novel than an investigative project. There are things that you believe to be true about your relatives and ancestors. When you simply cannot find a reliable record to prove what you believe, it may be time to search through the public records. The answers you get might not turn out to be the ones that you were expecting.
What are public records? They are documents that were created by a government organization. This can include things like real estate records, court records, records of bankruptcies, liens, and judgements, professional licenses, and even some records related to business.
Each state gets to decide what kinds of information will be a public record, and this definition can be different from one state to another. Some states will let a genealogist use a voter record in order to locate a missing person who is an heir, while other states won’t allow voter records into the public record. Most states will consider information like a person’s Social Security number, birth date, and medical history to be private, and therefore, not part of a public record.
If you type the phrase “public record” into google, you will immediately find a list of websites that can help a genealogist locate information that is part of the public record. I would recommend trying to find a website that will let you access this information for free, instead of one that requires you to pay a fee before you can see the information that you are looking for. After all, there are so many of these websites that you can pretty much take your pick. So, why pay for what you don’t have to?
The public records that originate from a court are going to be the most interesting to genealogists who are trying to solve a mystery about an ancestor. A marriage record can tell you, without a doubt, the exact year that two of your ancestors got married. This could answer some lingering doubts about whether or not someone had a baby “out of wedlock”, (assuming that you have the birth certificate for the child in question).
Divorce records can also answer some questions. In the past, divorce came with a certain amount of stigma. Women who were divorced may have claimed to be a widow when the census taker came to their door. If you weren’t sure if your ancestor was a widow, or was divorced, a public court record could solve that mystery for you.
Just because you find an answer doesn’t mean that the truth will match up to what you happened to believe to be true about your ancestor. Part of genealogy involves solving mysteries. Genealogists need to be prepared to revise some parts of their family history, based on new, reliable, information.
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