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Archiver > TMG > 2000-02 > 0950307946
From: <>
Subject: Re: TMG-L: Place Names...Yet Again
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 17:25:46 EST
Bud Dorr wrote:
"I have several hundred ancestors born in the State of Maine. Maine
became a
state in 1820; before then it was part of Massachusetts. Do I change
everything
prior to 1820 to Massachusetts? It just sounds silly, yet I realize that most
records for those locations before 1820 are stored in Massachusetts. There are
49 other states. What have more experienced users done?"
I don't know if I'm that much more experienced, but I have actually
found that most pre-1820 records for Maine are stored in Maine. There just
wasn't that much state-based record-keeping, it was town- or occasionally
county-based, so the records just stayed where they were, in York, Kittery,
or wherever. You do find Maine Revolutionary service in the Massachusetts
set of soldiers & sailors of the Revolution, but there's a Maine volume as
well. County court records, as far as I know, are with the county that they
were created in even if the locality was later made part of another county -
so you find records of some Sagadahoc County towns in Lincoln County,
Cumberland County towns in York County, and so on. I usually try to remember
to put either "Lincoln County, now Sagadahoc" or "Sagadahoc, then Lincoln
County" - and I really should standardize that! Since most of my ancestors
came to Maine by 1790 and stayed there, I don't know as much about the other
49 states, so maybe someone else has other ideas.
Nikki Strandskov
Minneapolis, MN
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