When you go about putting together your family history and you take out all of the memoirs and photographs and any other memorabilia that belongs to your family, all of it together paints a pretty average portrait.
Until you start digging. That’s where the good stuff is. You will find out that your family isn’t exactly that pinnacle of modern decency nor would you define some of your family members as even honest. And if you feel like you’ve hit a dead end, there is one source that people don’t often go to in order to find out more about their family history. Sure, you can find birth records, death records, marriages, kids, vital records, land records and any number of good common records that most anyone will have.
Have you checked for criminal records?
A ha! Touched a nerve? Yeah, 1 percent of the entire population of America is right now behind bars. Which means that one of your great-great-great granparents proabably did a few things their mother didn’t want them to. And since crime tends to run in the family, if you find one member of your family in trouble with the law, chances are you will find a few more. I can tell you of at least two family members I know of that spent time behind bars and evaded the authorities for a number of years.
So if you are running into dead ends with your searches, try hitting the local courthouse or library to look up criminal bookings and court proceedings – you might turn up some very interesting information there.
