Chapter 12. The families
Part 2. Reading your report.
After the first owners came the people who bought, inherited, farmed and logged the land. This part names the ones the records connect to it.
What it says. Names and years; at Full, census households and passages from county histories.
What to notice. This part is often thin, and that is honest. Family records are mostly kept where a computer cannot fetch them: deed books, census pages behind a free account, old newspapers, cemetery records and family papers. "If you're hooked" says where to look.
If the part is folded. "The census and newspaper records for families here are not part of the basic report."
In the sample report
The sample's families part is one short paragraph. No family or household tied to the township has been found yet, the search for that topic has not been run, and the census figures it gives describe the region, not the farm.1
From the farm's own history (not in the sample report)
The farm's own history went further, by hand. In a 1938 interview, a great-niece remembered John Johnson as "captain of the train," with a place already picked out near Pedee for her grandfather, James Taylor. A pioneer cemetery record adds that on March 19, 1854, Johnson married Taylor's daughter Phebe. Knowing Your Land, Chapter 22, tells how these were found.2