Ancestral Findings

Every family has secrets. But some secrets are darker than others—and some leave behind headlines, scars, and a trail of records in their wake. Murder cases, unsolved crimes, public hangings, or even ...

8 Aug 20257min

Not every crime makes headlines. In fact, many of the offenses found in old court records are small—petty theft, vagrancy, disturbing the peace, trespassing, or breaking local ordinances. These weren'...

6 Aug 20257min

In most family trees, the women are harder to trace. They often changed names, had fewer legal rights, and were less likely to appear in records that followed property or voting. But court records—esp...

5 Aug 20257min

During the 1920s and early 1930s, a jug of illegal whiskey could change a family's fortune—or tear it apart. Whether your ancestors ran stills deep in the woods or simply served homemade brew at a qui...

1 Aug 20258min

When most people think about court records in genealogy, they imagine criminal charges, jail time, or dramatic trials. But there's a quieter, more common type of legal record that can be just as revea...

31 Jul 20259min

Not every ancestor was a pillar of virtue. Some were drunks, swindlers, thieves—or worse. You may have been told stories about them, or maybe you found hints in old letters or whispered rumors passed ...

28 Jul 20258min

I remember watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on VHS with my parents when I was very young. That memory is still fresh. The soft hum of the tape rewinding, the old Disney clamshell case with the...

27 Jul 20256min

As we continue The Forgotten Seconds series — exploring the lives of U.S. vice presidents who never became president — we arrive at a man whose political career spanned decades and whose life ended ju...

25 Jul 202512min