When my sixth great-grandfather Jeremiah Shelton died in 1829 he left all of his possessions, including three slaves, to his children. But Jeremiah's widow Nancy had dower rights to a third of that estate during her lifetime. In her case that portion apparently included one of the three slaves, a young woman named Sylvia. When Nancy died in 1839 her dower portion reverted to the heirs, and that triggered a multi-year court battle for possession of Sylvia. Shelton et al vs Figg et al ( original document ) By the time Jeremiah died, almost all of Nancy and Jeremiah's children had moved away from the family home, which was a few miles outside of Morgantown, Kentucky, near the Sandy Creek branch of Big Muddy Creek ( map link ). The one remaining child was their daughter Sarah, who lived nearby with her husband Robert Figg and their children. The Figgs and Sylvia took care of the old couple as they entered the autumn of their years, including moving the widow Nancy into their home a...
In the 1850s my third-great-grandparents Patrick Quaid and Ellen Dundon lived in rural County Limerick. They lived in a townland called Ballymacamore, which was in a parish whose church was sometimes in Croagh and at other times in Kilfinny; it was a single parish but the central church moved over time . Since baptisms and marriages were recorded at the parish level, Croagh/Kilfinny is where events from Ballymacamore should be found. The old church ruins in Kilfinny, much older than any surviving records. Scans of Catholic parish registers are freely available at the National Library of Ireland site. Ancestry has indexes of the registers, but given the quality of the scans it's not clear how complete they might be. Perhaps more importantly, they don't always include ancillary information like the names of baptism sponsors and the more specific home of parents. That's important for me, because although I know Patrick & Ellen lived near several other families of Quaids,...