Lake County Ohio GenWeb About the Extracts of the Geauga County Deed Index for Townships which later became part of Lake County

A Project of Lake County Genealogical Society

Contents

1. Name Table
2. About the Extracts
• Scope
• The Process
• Sorting Rules
• Acknowledgment

Name Table

The following table lists the starting letters of the first surname or entity name for each of the extract files.

About the pre-1840 Deed Index Extracts

Scope

This is an extraction of those Geauga County Deed Index records for current Lake County lands: Concord, Kirtland, LeRoy, Madison, Mentor, Painesville, and Perry and northern Thompson (later southern Madison) townships before 1840, and Willoughby Township before 1810 (when it became part of Cuyahoga County). The part of Madison Township south of the Grand River was part of Thompson Township before 1840, but since records were abstracted by range and township, those records in this part of Thompson (Range 6, Township 11) were included. Willoughby Township records from 1810 through 1839 have not been abstracted from the Cuyahoga County records; these records are available online at the Cuyahoga County Recorder’s Office at http://recorder.cuyahoga.oh.us (off-site).

Geauga County made copies of deeds from this area recorded prior to establishment of the county in 1806; some of these deeds go back as far as 1795.

The Process

Some kind soul, currently unknown to us, had spent many hours in Chardon going through the deed index books and copying all the entries for the ranges and townships now included in Lake County, along with a few for familiar Lake County names. There is a card file at Lake County Historical Society for the grantees and a deed index book was purchased for the grantors. The writing in the book is consistent throughout, so it is certain that one person did that ledger. Whether the cards came from the ledger or the ledger from the cards is unknown, likely the former for lack of true alphabetization.

Carl Engel had made a photocopy of the ledger and provided it to Lake County Genealogical Society for this project. The pages were divided up into packets and disks with the template for typing and instructions were included in each. Every entry which had a multiple grantor names had to be duplicated with each set of names reversed so that all grantors and grantees would be included. A packet was typed onto the disk and returned for proofreading. The table was printed out. This and instructions for the proofing were included in the packet to be distributed. All of the corrections were then entered into the files. This allowed three different people a chance to interpret the entries. The file then went to the “computer department” who magically made both the grantee and grantor columns into one alphabetical list with the extra column to make it sort, and put it into the files you see.

Sorting Rules

The records were sorted by name and then by date, to provide a chronological record of deeds for each party. [Party may be a person or an entity, such as a company, city, township, or state.] A working column of names ‘adjusted’ for uniformity was used for the sort, but is not present in the finished abstracts. This allowed us to present the names as transcribed, while still keeping a party’s transactions in good date order. These adjustments included:

1. Expanding abbreviations of given names, such as John for ‘Jno.’, William for ‘Wm.’, etc.
2. Sorting multiple initials are as if separated by a space: ‘E.B. Jones’ would sort as ‘Jones, E. B.’
3. Removing spaces and other non-alpha characters, and expanding abbreviations in surnames; for example, St. John sorts as if spelled ‘saintjohn’, and O’Brien as ‘obrien’.
4. Putting modifiers or honorifics of the surname at the end of the adjusted name: Joseph Smith Jr. was sorted as ‘Smith, Joseph Jr.’
5. Not using modifiers such as ‘et al.’, ‘by executor’, by administrator’, ‘and wife’, nor multiple grantors/grantees. Leaving these in would have removed the deed from the date sort for the party. (Where more than one entity was involved, the entry was repeated using each entity.)
6. Where the grantor or grantee was an entity, rather than a person, most of the above rules were used, except that terms such as ‘Trustees of’ were left in the sort. In addition:
   1. School districts were standardized with township/village name followed by a two-digit district number: ‘Painesville School District No. 04’ instead of ‘School District No. 4, Painesville’ [Two digits so that district 4 (04) would sort before district 11]
   2. ‘State of Connecticut’ sorts as ‘Connecticut, State of’; ‘Township of Madison’ as ‘Madison Township’; etc.

A few things could not be adjusted:

• Use of initials versus given names. We cannot tell if ‘A. J. Smith’ is really Andrew James Smith or his son Andrew John, or someone else.
• Spelling variations, such as ‘Harcey’ vs ‘Harsey’, or ‘Abby’ vs ‘Abbey’. Spelling was still done phonetically in 1840, so we won’t make assumptions as to which is correct, or if they’re the same person. You need to check variations of the name(s) you are researching.

Acknowledgment

Thank you to the following:

• The person who originally extracted all this data in Geauga County.
• Lake County Historical Society for providing this information for the public and allowing us to post this here.
• Also to Carl Engel who started this project and provided the copies of the ledger.
• Morley Library and Sally Malone who allowed us to make the copies and shuffle packets in and out.
• Our typists who spent many hours copying tiny little squares of names and numbers, sometimes wildly large fractions or mixed fractions. They were amazingly accurate:

  Oscar Ash, Linda Strauss, Phyllis Williams, Carl Engel, Reenie DeMay, Sally Malone, Cynthia Turk, Suz Walker, and Barb Hurst

• Our proofreaders who spent even more hours comparing those tiny little squares of names and numbers and making the few corrections necessary:

  Lil Ruggeri, Sue, Janet Kucera, Beth Stachiw, Joy McMullen, Linda Kless, and Marianne Wiley. 

• Herb Turk for doing the computer technology end of the project from the original template, the instructions, the alphabetical transformation, additional corrections and clarifications, the introduction, and putting it into HTML format for the internet.

As coordinator for this project, I appreciate all the work and dedication this took. Thank you to all. Cynthia Turk

Addendum note 3 Aug 2014. Errors occasionally crop up. It is noted that Mayhew Hillman has a few misspellings, one is Mayhem, the other Willman. Be aware when searching.