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9 page PDF research guide includes:
Guide for The Fence Laws: How Livestock Shaped Mountain Boundaries
Your ancestor’s boundary line was never just a legal description in a deed book. It was a fence a neighbor swore had held for twenty years, or a hog’s ear notched the same way his father’s had been notched before him. Court clerks scattered the record of it across six different record types, most filed under headings that give no hint they touch genealogy at all: mark books bound apart from the deeds, court order books that list fence viewers right alongside road overseers, civil dockets naming only a plaintiff and a defendant. This companion moves through all six with search strategies built for each one, a signal-reading guide for dating a boundary change against your own county’s timeline instead of a regional average, and a thirteen-state repository guide that accounts for county lines that moved and the border West Virginia drew for itself in 1863.
What's Inside
- Six-record-type reference table covering earmark and brand registers, fence viewer appointments, trespass suits, stock law petitions, newspaper coverage, and state supreme court files, with where each is filed, what it reveals, and how to search it
- Signal interpretation table for reading and dating a boundary change from the records you find
- Thirteen-state repository and access guide, plus the Library of Congress, with notes on moved county lines and the 1863 Virginia/West Virginia split
- Stock Law Adoption Tracking table for confirming your ancestor’s exact county and township adoption date
- Record Log for logging findings across all six record types
- Seven-prompt analysis worksheet
- Notes pages