Courthouse Records. What records are available and where to find them.
Ancestry Academy video The Key to the Courthouse: Unlocking the past.
Reasearching Courthouse Records by Sandra Hargreaves Luebking, FIGA Loretto Dennis Szucs, FUGA, and Arlene H. Eakle.
ELLIS COUNTY, TEXAS
Ellis County Courthouse
Ellis County Public Records online
Ellis County on Rootsweb.com
Navarro County is the parent county of Ellis County
Ellis County TXGenWeb
1850 Minutes of Commissioners
List of County Records
Ellis County Will Book A
Ellis County Will Book 2
Ellis County Will Book 3
Early Guardianships
Marriage Records
Book A Sept. 1850 - Nov. 1857
Book B Nov. 1857 - July 1872
Book C Aug. 1872 - April 02, 1878
Book D Beginning 3 April 1878
Online Resources in Ancestry.com Card Catalog. search Court, Governmental and Criminal Records and then subcategories for country, state and individual databases.
Examples:
Texas, Convict and Conduct Registers, 1875-1945
Texas County Tax Rolls 1846-1910
Wills & Probate
NAVARRO COUNTY
Not all records a located in the clerks office. You may need to request records from storage.
Property records
Navarro search website now has county land records from 1985 to the present.
Texas Land Records
Enter website address choose Navarro County
$1.00 per page to print/Credit card required
RESEARCHING THE GENEALOGY OF YOU HOUSE
If you happen to own a historic property, or you want to research an ancestral home, researching those who lived there and owned the property may reveal some exiting information about your family.
TITLE SEARCH
Steps of researching your home.
1. Current address of the property you are researching.
2. Current owner. If this isn't you, you can find the current owner in the database of properties on the courthouse computerized database. This is only available at the courthouse.
3. Determine the Grantor (who sold the house to the current owner). There should be a reference in the deed about the former owner. Look for a reference to volume and page.
4. Go to the Volume and Page of the previous sales transaction which normally will make reference to the previous one and keep on following the trail backwards.
This type of search is not the easiest thing to do. Very often properties have been subdivided. The lot and block may have change as a city grew. Addresses also changed due to growth.
WHO LIVED AT THE PROPERTY 1940 and prior
You can search the census by location. The first census available is the 1940 census. Once you establish the way a property is recorded by the enumerator, it will be easier to go backwards in the census. With this type of search you can learn the occupations of the residents of the property, who may or may not be the owners. It helps you understand the community and the growth of an area. This is invaluable when writing a history of your family. You can give it a little color with the additional research.
Genealogy Detective
GENEALOGY WORKSHOP
WAXAHACHIE SENIOR CENTER
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Courthouse Records
by
Sharron Mirikitani