By Winston De VilleRecords of criminal court cases are not often sought out by family historians. They can, however, be very revealing, especially when depositions by witnesses are included. From the ninth volume of the Archives of Spanish West Florida (at page 119), for example, we read of the murder, in 1805, of Joseph Sharp by William Flannegan. Sharp, a school teacher, and Flannegan, "a quarrelsome drunkard," had been sitting on the door steps of the Lawrence plantation in St. Helena District, Louisiana. Flannegan, who wanted to remove his children from school, and, in fact, wanted "to break up the school," suddenly grabbed his gun, chased Sharp around the house, and shot him in the back, fatally. Those kinds of stories will make any genealogy more interesting, but it is from the plantation owner’s deposition that we learn so much about him. We offer it as only one example of the many criminal cases in courthouses that contain an abundance of data for family history. From the few questions that open the deposition, we learn that he was Peter Lawrence, Sr., born circa 1753 in Virginia. He was, however, "brought up" in North Carolina, and moved to Louisiana in 1802. His occupation was "planter." Flannegan was also apparently from North Carolina, for Lawrence had known him "since he was a lad." The problem with doing research in court records is, of course, that when they are indexed at all at courthouses, only principals, plantiff and defendant, are included. It is worth the researcher’s while, however, to examine period groups of such records page by page, when attempting to find information on a particularly elusive ancestor. He might have been a court case witness, and as we can see above, the reward can be great. |
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