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10 page PDF research guide includes:
Guide for The Legal Cold Shoulder: What a County Did When a Stranger Showed Up Unannounced
A security or vagrancy bond does not always name the person you are trying to find. When a resident brought a newcomer into a county, Virginia's courts, and the North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee courts that inherited or adapted its system, recorded the resident's name as surety far more often than the newcomer's own. An ancestor who left no deed, no tax entry, and no church record can still be sitting in a county's order books right now, present only inside someone else's case, filed under a name your family tree does not currently hold. This companion moves through the record language each state used for it, a nine-step plan for locating and reading an entry correctly, a glossary for the court's own phrasing, and a tracker for following a case that was renewed or continued across more than one term.
What's Inside
- Record language reference table covering Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, plus West Virginia's continuation of Virginia's practice after 1863
- Nine-step research plan for locating, reading, and following a security or vagrancy entry
- Eight-term glossary for reading court language correctly, from idle vagrant person to recognizance
- Repository and access guide covering all thirteen Appalachian states and the Library of Congress
- Mail and email request checklist for contacting courthouses and archives directly
- The Renewed Order Tracker for following a case across multiple court terms, with three analysis prompts
- Research worksheet with an ancestor identification block, a case log, and a same-term cluster tracker
- Two ruled notes pages