Researching a Family Buried on the Eastern Shore

People arrive at old cemeteries looking for ancestors. On this coast the research is unusually complicated, because the ground changed hands between four administrations and each kept its own records in its own language.

Know which administration you are looking under

This is the first question, and it determines everything else.

French, from 1699. Records in French, largely ecclesiastical — baptisms, marriages, burials kept by the parish rather than the state.

British, 1763 to 1780. A short period, but it brought a different administrative system and a wave of new arrivals.

Spanish, 1780 to 1813. Spanish land grants from this period are disproportionately important, because American courts later used them to establish title. The grant records are frequently the best documentation of who held which ground.

American, from 1813 onward, with Alabama statehood in 1819.

A family present through the whole sequence appears in four separate record systems, under variant spellings, in three languages.

Where the records are

Church registers. For the French and Spanish periods, Catholic parish registers in Mobile are often the primary source and frequently more reliable than headstones — they were written at the time of the event.

Land grant records. Spanish and British grants were reviewed and recorded by American land commissions after 1813. Those files contain claims, testimony and surveys, and they are among the richest sources for who lived where.

County records from 1809 onward: deeds, probate, wills, estate inventories. Estate inventories are unusually informative, since they list property in detail.

Federal census from 1820 for Alabama. Before 1850 only heads of household are named, with others counted by age and sex bracket.

Newspapers, from the mid-nineteenth century, for obituaries and notices.

When the stone and the record disagree

Trust the contemporaneous record over the marker.

Headstones were frequently carved years after death, sometimes generations later by descendants working from family memory. Errors in dates are common. Where a baptismal register gives one birth year and a stone gives another, the register is usually right — and the discrepancy itself is worth noting rather than resolving silently.

The gaps that matter

Enslaved people are largely absent from the record by design. They appear in estate inventories as property, in census tallies as counts, occasionally in Catholic baptismal registers by first name. They do not appear in deeds as parties, in probate as heirs, or usually on stones.

A plantation cemetery contains the people who worked the plantation. The marked graves are the people who owned it. Any account of such a site that describes only the named burials is describing a small minority of the people buried there.

Researchers working on this have developed approaches — cross-referencing inventories, freedmen's records after 1865, and post-emancipation census entries where surnames were taken. It is difficult work and it is the part of the record most worth doing.

Women appear inconsistently, often only as wives in relation to a husband, and frequently under a maiden name in one record and a married name in another.

Native people displaced during and after the Creek War largely vanish from the local record entirely.

Practical method

Start with what you can verify and work backward one generation at a time. Do not begin from a family tree found online.

Record your sources as you go, including the ones that contradicted each other.

Photograph stones in raking light rather than making rubbings, which damage weathered stone.

Expect variant spellings. A French surname passing through Spanish and then American clerks can appear a dozen ways.

Contact the local historical and genealogical societies. For a county this size, the people who know the records are findable and generally willing.

Burials recorded at the cemetery here: see D'Olive Cemetery