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11 page PDF research guide includes:
Guide for Where the River Carried Us: Appalachian Ferries, Family Lines, and the Quiet Geography of Movement
The sureties on a ferry bond are almost never strangers. Courts required men who could absorb a financial loss to stand behind the ferryman's promise of safe operation, and in practice that meant brothers, fathers-in-law, or neighbors who shared a land boundary. When you find a ferry license in the county order book, you are not looking at a business permit. You are looking at a map of the neighborhood. Work every surety name through the land records and tax lists for the same years, and you are building a picture of where your ancestor sat in that community. When the order book is gone because of courthouse fire, flood, or plain bad luck, the deed books almost always preserve the ferry name as a boundary marker, even decades after the crossing closed. A deed that reads "beginning at a sycamore near Lusk's Ferry" places a family on a specific stretch of river when no license record survives. The crossing outlasted the record that created it.
What's Inside
- Ferry record types reference table covering county court minutes, ferry bonds and sureties, deed books, tax lists, probate and estate records, road orders and petitions, census schedules, gazetteers, military records, state legislative records, and period maps, with genealogical information yielded and notes for researchers
- Eight-step sequence for working ferry evidence from first river identification through court minutes, surety cross-reference, deed book search, landscape placement, movement correlation, probate and tax check, and documenting absences
- Repository and access guide organized by state for Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and the Ohio River corridor
- Finding aids and digital tools table covering David Rumsey Map Collection, FamilySearch Catalog, Ancestry microfilm index, and migration corridor documentation
- Research worksheet with ferry record log covering ferry name, keeper, sureties, and what the record reveals
- Movement corridor notes table for mapping ferry locations against known residences and migration patterns
- Notes pages