Companion to "Estray Books: Finding the Family Horse: How Lost Livestock Became One of Appalachia's Most Revealing Record Types"
When a horse wandered off a ridge farm in early Appalachia, the law required a precise sequence of public notices, appraisals, and court filings. For genealogists, those filings put named neighbors on record in places and years where almost nothing else survives. Includes an Estray Entry Transcription Worksheet, a neighborhood cluster tracker for mapping appraisers and witnesses, a guide to the legal sequence and what each step produced, and a state-by-state repository reference for locating estray books across the Appalachian region.