Daily Archive: April 15, 2020

Court records are important resources for genealogists for many reasons. They can establish family relationships, places of residence, and provide various kinds of family history information. Unfortunately, they tend to be difficult to use because they’re not usually well-indexed, there are many different kinds of records, and court names and jurisdictions changed over time. Also, researchers will need to learn lots of legal terms and abbreviations in order to understand the legalities in these documents. Fortunately, you can get a good basic understanding of court records and legal terminology by using some resources included later in this post. In the U. S. several types of courts exist. They include federal, state, and local courts, each designed to handle certain types of legal cases. The federal court system was established in  1789, and district courts were established in each state. Some states were divided into two or more districts as the...