Lancaster Family in Rockwall County, Texas: The importance of not just collecting deeds but actually transcribing them
This week, now that I have more time to spend on my own family research, I decided to work on some back-logged records I had collected from microfilm at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City back in 2015. I had nearly 200 deed images from Rockwall County, Texas, which used to be part of Kaufman County. Actually it was more like 75 deed records, as most had two or three images per deed record. I didn’t fully transcribe each record, but created abstracts of the important information, especially the description of the land being sold, but also kept track of the buyer and seller’s residence, how much they paid for the land, and whether they paid cash or on credit. I entered each deed into the RootsMagic database on my computer, and tagged anyone who was also in the database. Sometimes family sells land to other family members. Now that I’m writing this, I wished I had kept a log of all of the deeds I collected. The images have been renamed and moved to the appropriate fol