A Little-Used Genealogy Resource: Legal Notices in Newspapers

One of the lectures in our upcoming 2023 annual Family History Conference will be “Advertising the Law: The Gems in Legal Notices,” presented by our featured speaker, Judy Russell. If you have used newspapers in your research for the wide array of information you can find in them, you have probably seen those notices, but maybe you skipped over them because you were searching for a feature article or an obituary. However, you might want to pay a bit more attention once you see how valuable a resource those little ads can be.

Our ancestors used legal notices to notify the public about legal actions that needed to be published per a law Congress passed in 1789 that required “all bills, orders, resolutions, and congressional votes to be published in at least three publicly available newspapers.” So you are likely to find information on land sales, payment of taxes, probate matters, settlement of estates, divorces, and much more in these ads. You may find notices to creditors on estate settlements that list names, dates, and places. Court actions may include descriptions of property, foreclosures, delinquent taxes, petitions for divorce, or even requests for pardon from crimes.

Most often located at the back of a newspaper, but sometimes appearing in newspapers entirely devoted to legal notices, these ads can help point you to court cases you might not have known about or help you learn more when courthouse records are missing or destroyed.

Here are two examples from twentieth-century newspapers, one in Kentucky, the other Missouri. The first, "Notice of Final Settlement," tells us the name of the deceased, the name of the executor, and a date and place for the final settlement of the deceased's estate. Now, if we didn't know when or where W. F. Lane died, we would have enough to track down his death certificate, and, by looking at probate records in Boone County, we might learn a lot more about his property and family.

(Daily Missourian, Columbia, Missouri, 21 January 1917, p. 7, image 7 

from Chronicling America, Library of Congress, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ : accessed 23 April 2023)

In our second example, we learn of an auction being held in Maysville, Mason County, Kentucky. We learn the nature of J. T. Martin and Son's business and that the contents are being sold as a "trustee's sale in bankruptcy." We have a date and a location and an intriguing topic to now research to determine how this business managed to fail and why.

(The Public Ledger, Maysville, Kentucky, 23 November 1921, p. 4, image 4,

 from Chronicling America, Library of Congress, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ : accessed 23 April 2023)

You can learn so much more about finding and using these valuable legal notices and benefit from seven other exciting presentations on Saturday, 6 May 2023 at our annual Family History Conference. Registration remains open for in-person and Zoom attendance on the Family History Conference page on the StLGS website.