The best successes in my U.S. genealogical research trips have been those for which I was most prepared. And yet, despite all the careful preparation, there are always those times when I've come up with a big, fat goose egg. It also seems to me that courthouses are the places where I most often come up empty-handed on locating materials I expected to find there.

This week I'd like to address five of the top reasons that we don't always succeed in hitting the mother lode in our courthouse research and make suggestions for overcoming the most common obstacles.

Reason One:
Assuming Documents Are at a Specific Courthouse
The most common mistake we all make at one time or another is assuming that something will just be there in a specific courthouse. And yes, I've made a few assumptions like this and suffered as a result. There are few things worse than going to the wrong courthouse and asking for materials that never would have been there. (I know that more than one courthouse clerk has had a good belly laugh at my expense!)

The most reliable way to avoid the “wrong courthouse” pitfall is to be thorough in your historical/geographical research before you leave home. You can do this by first determining the time period during which your ancestor or family member lived in the area. Second, read some history and learn more about that specific area to better understand what government(s) might have been in power at that time, what documents they might generated, and the reason(s) why they were produced.

Use one or more historical maps of that place from that historical period and focus on boundary lines. Based on the boundaries at that time, determine where the seat of government was. That is your first point of inquiry about the documents and whether they survived, and you will want to make contact with the courthouse or another government office in that place.

Reason Two:
Documents Have Been Stored

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