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The DENTON Paper Trail considers deed sales and deed recording of said land in any given state, parish, county, commonweath, colony, etc.
The description of land in the deed in any given year will speak of land boundaries with neighbors who may be relatives of record or may prove later to be an allied line later.
This paper trail may be court documents for probate, wills and administrations, assessments and tax lists, voting lists, petit and grand jury lists. Court appointments of guardians, poor school bonds, civil court proceedings as well as divorce by court or by legislature.
Military paper trail will be listings of muster in and muster out in the French Indian, Rev War, War 1812 and/or any given year there was an Indian War. Large troop movements will generate paper work that deals with siege of goods whether for state or for the crown.
There is the paper trail dealing with applications for and disposition of the certificates for pensions for any given war period.
The early years persons had to get permission to enter the lands of the Indians by the state whereas someone had to vouch for your ethics and sanity in order for you to enter or cross the Indian Lands to do business.
The early church of the English Crown was the first line of government that held court and collected the taxes due to the king.
Church records will show birth, marriage, and death with burial within the church cemetery. Letters to enter the church as well as leaving the church to go further west to new chuch.
The paper trail deals with the many letters to ones ancestors that never came in to get their mail. General stores have ledgers full of names of folks who did business as well as those who left without settling accounts. Doctors and ministers generated many books dealing with the minutes of the day doing their work.
Sextants keep logs of burials within the cemeteries. Sheriff and marshalls generated logs. Men and women keep diaries as well as children who grew up to be heroes as such.
Fraternal organizations keep records as well. Militia captains had to keep records.
There are records listing how one would pay for the services of others. Before coins and paper money one was paid by weight of tobacco.
If you could not pay the norm then you gave the time of yourself until such time full payment was satisfied. That generated paper work as well.
Apprenticeship generated paperwork. Bonding and slavery generated paperwork. Ship masters had to keep paper records in and out of ports.
Of course, all of this paperwork that we are seeking to see or touch is second hand information. We did not generate this paperwork because we were not there in the first place. Even that DENTON individual was recorded by another person of "official" capacity did so after the fact.
So we have to rely on several records that may not agree on the date nor agree on the exact name to get a concensus. Sometimes we have to have five sources to get a concensus.
Too many times the "official" record is made from memory of those who were there and saw the event different than another. Some of these records were generated several years later.
Be sure to check out the county histories as well as the county history books for next door counties and depending on what year you are looking at you have to bear in mind that the county line may have changed many times and your ancestor never moved an inch.
We cannot be everywhere and that is where posting on as many different sites as well as different periods of time on those sites will eventually get you the data you need. You never know when someone will come along with the piece of the puzzle you do not have and have been looking for a long time for it.
This person comes along and they are looking for the data you have and they are just as frustrated as you are. I still get responses to posts I have made prior to 1995 on other ISP and email addresses.
I still get snail mail from folks who have seen my posts in genealogy magazines in the 1970`s.
Folks are coming on to genealogy every day because they just got bit by the bug or now they have time to devote to searching their roots.
You and I have already gone the route of libraries, history centers, archives, court houses, cemeteries, battlefields, and state road maps.
We have outlived the dust, dirt, mold, wasps, bees, skeeters, briars, and poor lighting.
I have lost count of the many pages that did not have the data I wanted. But, when I did see something related to the surname I was following at the time I did transcribe that data just in case. You never know when the trail turns back onto you and you find out that particular individual was indeed part and parcel of the bunch you were trying to follow.
You are doing the right thing about waiting on the data in MS. Many times those researchers of county books do not get all of the facts. Sometimes we have to go over that ground again to see what they did miss.
Sometimes, I forget whether I am looking for the trees in the forest or am I supposed to look past the trees to see the whole forest.
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