A deep dive into the way the law impacts records
May 1.
Law Day in the United States.
And a day when The Legal Genealogist is hard at work, putting together the lesson plan for a special two-part offering that just might be what you need. It’ll start in just three weeks, and there are just a few seats left, so…
The course is called Decoding Records: Using the Law and it’s offered through the Family History Academy. It’ll meet on two consecutive Thursdays, 23 May and 30 May, 7-9 p.m. EDT, and the course cost is $127.
What we’re going to do — so the description says — is “dive deeper into records—and learn how the law shapes our understanding of historical documents…. Through hands-on sessions focusing on various record types and practical assignments, you’ll master the art of interpreting legal documents to uncover the true stories of your ancestors. Transform your genealogical research by integrating the power of the law!”
So… why is this whole notion an important one?
Well, it’s because there’s a whole lot more to the records we find than we often see on the surface. For example, we’re happy to see an ancestor’s name on a list of jurors from 1748 Virginia. But that name on that list means more than just that he lived in that time and place. Looking at the law, we’d know he also was a property owner and wasn’t the operator of a tavern or owner of a mill.
When we see an ancestor serving as executor of an estate in Connecticut in 1816, we conclude that he would have been at least age 21 to handle real estate sales, taxes and other issues. But looking at the law, we’d discover he could have been as young as 17 and been allowed to handle the estate.
Records don’t exist in a vacuum. They usually exist because of the law. Their contents are often dictated by the law. And it’s the law that tells us if we can rely on any part of those contents as evidence. Adding the law to the records, we gain a deeper, broader, more accurate picture of our ancestors.
Saying that we can’t understand the records without understanding the law is a truism of genealogy. So in this course, we’ll work from a set of provided documents to consider the nature of a genealogical source, the information it contains, the factors that determine what information may be relied upon as genealogical evidence and what sound conclusion may be drawn from that evidence to reach genealogical proof. And, of course, we’ll do it all with a focus on how that entire process is impacted by the laws of the time and place.
So let me extent a Law Day invitation. Join me and the Family History Academy for Decoding Records: Using the Law.
I’d love to see you in class.
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “A Law Day invitation,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 1 May 2024).
