![]() It doesn’t help any that many of Hawkins County’s records burned in the Civil War, including marriage records and wills. Truthfully, with Dodson Creek, Dodson Ford, Dodson Creek Church and Dodson Creek Cemetery, how tough could this be – really? The answer is, much more difficult than I anticipated. And while it should have been relatively easy, scattered records, burned records and quirky turns made the task much more difficult than I expected. The problem is that I wasn’t happy with that, and I had to go to Hawkins County and try to find his land. We have the bookends of Raleigh’s life pretty well documented – birth and death. Most courthouses won’t allow scanners or photography of the books, but you just never know what else you’ll run across in other locations. The bad part about doing original research is that you have to sort through a lot of chaff to find any wheat – and I’m reasonably confident that it’s just the chaff that is missing – because thankfully it was the wheat that I printed to use the following day when I returned to the courthouse.Īnd the answer to the next question you’re about to ask is yes, I do carry a printer (and also a scanner) with me when I travel. Now that I think of it, it’s pretty amazing that we can reconstruct any of someone’s life nearly 300 years after their birth – as they traipsed across frontiers. But now it’s done and Raleigh’s life is in order – or as much order as I can give him more than 220 years after he departed this life. Thankfully, I still have the most important parts and I think I’ve been able to reconstruct most everything relevant – although it felt like it took forever and it was far from joyful. I can’t go back and recover much of what was lost. So, every time I have an anti-packrat moment and tell myself it’s OK to throw something away – I think of situations like this.Īfter that, for me, to even think about Raleigh was to feel very discouraged. And if you’re wondering if I threw the original notes away after I transcribed them – yes – for the most part. Now, the saving grace, if there is one, is that I printed parts of those transcriptions which were in the files with some of the notes – and I made copies of some of the deeds at courthouses. I swear, I thought I transferred those files to my desktop at home – but I obviously did not – because after my laptop was stolen, those transcribed pages were no more. Notes made in courthouses during the day were transcribed at night on my laptop in hotel rooms. I had transcribed close to 200 pages in a MSWord document over 3 or 4 weeks while visiting Tennessee during multiple trips. I hate messes like this, and Raleigh, truthfully, was a mess.Īnd even more discouraging, Raleigh wasn’t always a mess. Can I tell you a secret? I’ve been dreading and putting off writing this article because I’ve gathered information on Raleigh for so long, it’s in so many places and it’s not the least bit organized.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |