Not everything burned -- partitions and mortgages in Licking County, Ohio

I'm fond of Licking County, Ohio, not only because of its unique name, but because I have many ancestors and relatives there. It is one of Ohio's burned counties, having suffered a courthouse fire in 1875.

Fortunately, the property records survived intact. Court and marriage and probate records, not so much. But there are substitutes. One potential substitute is partition records -- court records of those cases where heirs agree on (or dispute) the partition or sale of land they inherited jointly. Sometimes these records include cute little maps of the divided-up property; very often they list all the heirs.

The situation in Licking County is complex and somewhat obscure, and you may find similar tangled webs in your burned county of choice. The county's partition records escaped the fire, and in fact have been not just microfilmed but recently digitized by FamilySearch in the "Ohio Probate Records 1789-1996" collection, totaling 7 million images. Like many such collections, there is no volunteer-created index (yet), and the digitized the in-book indexes fail the Mills Index Test: they do not cover all the cases in their own books.

Meanwhile, at some point the Licking County Clerk had the original partition records retyped, surely a huge job (and judging from the falling-apart character of the microfilmed originals, necessary). Apparently about this same time the clerk created an every-name index to these partition cases, including maiden and married names for the women. It occupies three heavy volumes now slumbering in the courthouse basement in Newark. (I almost missed them but the kind and helpful clerks found them.)

Fortunately, the original handwritten partition records were microfilmed. Unfortunately, the every-name indexes were not. That's a resource that court researchers would commit serious mayhem to have in THEIR county.

So while the partitions themselves are on line in their original form via FamilySearch, there is no decent index to them UNLESS you go to Newark on a weekday and ask at the clerk's office for the index books to be brought up from the basement so that you can tell which record book you need. (FYI the indexes do not give dates, but I can tell you that Partition Book C covers 1844-1851, E 1861-1865, and G 1869-1873.) This is the best substitute for the burned probates that I have seen yet -- provided that your family had real estate to partition!

Licking County does have its own Records and Archives Department. Its lists of old records and their whereabouts were indispensable in this quest, and then I learned about their new online catalog, still a work in progress. Their knowledge was also indispensable when I needed to consult mortgage indexes and mortgage books from before 1892 (the earliest index available in the recorder's office). They located the earlier indexes (still in the inventorying process) and the two actual mortgage volumes I needed, on short notice.

Apparently these are an extremely underused resource. I was happy to be (apparently) the first person to ask for them in decades, but hopefully others will follow much sooner. They add a dimension, especially in cases where the trail of deeds grows cold.



Photo credit: Licking County Courthouse, banukab's photostream, IMG 7587, flickr.com, per Creative Commons


Harold Henderson, "Not everything burned -- partitions and mortgages in Licking County, Ohio," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 July 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]