Tagged: #courtrecords

You can learn a lot about your ancestors by looking at their possessions, or at least by looking at lists of their possessions if you don’t have historical artifacts or documents. Today’s blog will discuss estate inventories and how they were made by the wealthy, poor, and all those in between. Whether they held $50,000 in bank stock or only a cow and some pots and pans, our ancestors deserve to be remembered for who they were. Estate inventories are frequently overlooked by genealogists because they believe these documents don’t provide genealogical evidence. But they do provide a glimpse into your ancestor’s personal life and the material culture of his or her time. For this reason, we’re going to take an economics approach as well as a genealogical one. By blending these approaches, we can get a much clearer and closer understanding of the world our ancestors lived in and...