State-County Tables & my Location Binder (Part 2)

To continue on with the State - County Tables and to explain columns F & G. Column F is a column referring to being a 1^st generation parent county of one of the counties listed in Column A. Then Column G is a 2^nd generation parent county of one of the counties listed in Column A. The easiest example to use is Mitchell County. Mitchell County was created in 1857. Before 1857, Mitchell was part of Baker County and Baker was part of Early County before Baker was created in 1825. So Baker gets a mark in Column F for Mitchell and Early County gets a mark in Column G for Mitchell County as 1^st and 2^nd generation parent counties of Mitchell. Columns H-J and K-M are for my 1850 and 1860 slave schedules respectively. I set them up to know in advance how many pages I'm looking at should I decide to search through them page by page. You notice the comment triangle there and the comment text. The text shows me what surnames I'm looking for should I decide to search those census. You might also notice that I greyed out those 1850 or 1860 columns for the counties that did not exist at that time.

On to columns N & O. I happened to hear somewhere that there was a surge of county history documentation at the time of the bicentennial and there was another surge at the turn of the century. Well I'm more interested in the county histories that were written for the turn of the century 1899 to 1900 or soon before of after. That's what I'm calling the old ones. The new ones, bicentennial and turn to the 21^st century, I am lumping together as new. The only county history that I can specifically say I have is Jackson County GA. One day soon, I'll be making a concerted effort to find some county histories. My favorite place to look is on Google Books. I will confess that the old Jackson County history came from rootsweb.

Courthouse disasters? Fire, flood and other disasters. If I at least document the year, I can know that I may have challenges finding info before that year. Columns beginning at R for the 1940 census and below are for the purpose of my refiling when I get aroundtiut. My census pages hard copies are currently filed with the family files but I'll soon be moving them to their state and county file folders. I happened to find for example one of my great grandmother's brothers on the same census page as she. Rather than make a duplicate copy, I made a note on the brother's family group sheet for the short term. When I do get my census pages refiling done, I'll be making a note on both their FGSs where I'll find the census page is in the county file folder. In addition to that, the 1940 column for the short term is for the purpose of identifying to myself that I have all the appropriate addresses in preparation for the 1940 census that shows up in 840 days. Whoooooooooo hoooooooooooo! I'm looking forward to that! It will be here before you know it. For the 1940, I have all of Mahoning County (Youngstown) Ohio done. That's my largest concentration outside of Georgia for that year. The others? Some are on my agenda for my next trip back to Fort Wayne.

As I looked back to the State - County Tables in my Location Binder (Part 1), I realized that even though I mentioned grids for the maps, I may not have explained enough. The grids were created in MS Paint (believe it or not, I use MS Paint a LOT). They are a full page of broken horizontal and vertical lines that create approximately a one inch square. Numbers are horizontal across the top from 1 to 8 and letters vertically down the side from A to J so that the intersection about 4E or 5E is approximately center of the page. After I got them just the way I wanted, I re-saved it as grid.jpg. Then as I mentioned earlier, I printed them on transparency paper. I also bought these as single sheets from Staples or Office Depot. My last visit to Staples for these, the copy center tech told me they may as well print them for me too because I was paying for that whether they printed them or not. I let them do that. The margins were off a little bit from where I had them but that's OK. You might have noticed quite a few mistakes from the explanations I provided. I decided that is probably another good reason to blog, is that we find mistakes in our research. Actually column G for Early County did not have a purple mark until today as I wrote this article. Columns F & G need to be totally reworked.

OK, that's it for the State - County Tables. Let me tell you what else is in the Location Binder. I started out with one 1 1/2 inch binder and later added a one inch one. They are both orange durable; orange is the color for my location files. I don't use tabs in these binders, I use Cosmic (bright) Orange 24 lb paper as dividers. I bought about 10 orange single sheets. I simply print the state name on both sides of the page, stick them in a page protector and that is my divider. I can just thumb through the pages and look for the color orange and I know that is a divider for another state. Is this too much detail???

Next I'll blog more about the rest of my Location Binder and I'll finish up with what I call my drag bag. Stay tuned for Part 3. There will be no Part 4, I promise.