Many of the records contained in this book were found online. Both originals and typescripts are often available, for free, at Familysearch, if you know how to look.

I am including this brief tutorial so that readers might, if they choose, go and look at the original documents which, while important to the story, did not merit inclusion as an attachment to the book.

We will use as an example this entry from the book, with its endnote:

Jesse Cox is found on a deed in Oglethorpe County, Georgia in 1796.

(Endnote) Oglethorpe County deed book, Georgia. Superior Court (Oglethorpe County), Book B, p. 247

 

Armed with this information, navigate to Familysearch.com. In the menu, locate Search, and in the dropdown, click Catalog.

You will see by default a Place search box. For this purpose, that is the search we should use. In that box, type the following:

            United States, Georgia, Oglethorpe

A dropdown will appear with those words, click on it.

This takes us to all of the records Familysearch.com holds for that place.

What we are looking for here is Land and Property. Clicking on that gets us another list of what is available. The one we want looks like this:

Oglethorpe County deed book

Author: Georgia. Superior Court (Oglethorpe County)

When we click on this, we get another page containing all the deed books for Oglethorpe. In this case, by each deed book is a camera icon. That is good news! This means these records are viewable online. In other cases, you may find a film role icon, not good news, because those are microfilm, which can only be viewed in Salt Lake City. If a camera with a lock appears, that means you can visit a Family History Center, and view those films online there, using their computers.

Since we have a camera for Oglethorpe, we can see these records online now. Clicking on the camera takes you to the files. Keep in mind that if there is more than one book in a file, as in this case, that affects page numbers. The document we are looking for is in Book B, on page 247. If we go to the first page 247 in this file, we will be in Book A, which is not where we want to be.

Where we end up when we find this document is on IMAGE 348, which is page 247 of Book B. Eureka, original document, with witnesses, land description, signatures, and all kinds of useful information.

Sometimes, there are deed indexes included in the information available. They may be a separate file within which you can look up the name of the buyer or seller of the land, the book number and page of the document you need. Then you can go to that deed book, and find the document. Other times, the index will be a hand-written inclusion at the beginning of the images of the deeds. That is the case with the example above. Either way, they are very helpful.

I hope you will find this useful when you are reading and/or searching for original documents. This is a great tool, but can be tricky to figure out.