If you are a frequent researcher of courthouses or digitized court records you might have seen some oops! What I mean by oops, are records in a ledger designated for a specific topic but has a page or pages that has nothing to do with the book’s title.
For instance, this past week I am looking for any document that puts a Simon Bailey McElroy in Paulding County. The goal is to prove he is the son of a John McElroy. I was researching on FamilySearch.org and looking at marriage books. Often, the roll will have more than one digitized microfilm book on the roll. So I set it to grid view and then shrink it all the way down so I can see if other books show up. As I started to do this, I saw several pages that stood out as ‘different.’
When you do enough research, you see patterns inside these old ledgers and when something looks off, it catches your attention. When I zoomed in, I saw numerous pages that do not contain marriage information but County Treasury reports. Since I live within a 20-minute drive of the courthouse and because I can scan a real book quicker than I can the online microfilm, I drove to the courthouse. About 20 pages of Paulding County Marriage Book 1 contain lists of money coming into the county and money going out in 1840. While I did not find my Simon Bailey McElroy, I find it interesting that this type of error occurred and it leaves me baffled as to how it could have happened unless their treasurer ledger was missing and this was the easiest book to grab.
This was not the first time I have seen this. Though rare, it has occurred and is one reason I often open a FamilySearch.org roll and do the same to see if there are any anomalies that might reveal the information I want in a place that is not indexed and where you would not expect to find it. Had this error been in the book’s latter half, I might not have seen it. I don’t spend a lot of time looking for these occurrences but they are fun to look at and I think some should be indexed and annotated in published index books.
