OMG! The most amazing thing just happened!
Sep 8th, 2008 by Ruth Stephens
I just put in the search term “s w l kennedy” into the Google News Archive Search and got back a Supreme Court of Texas document from 1886! It deals with the appeal of the Last Will & Testament (sorry if I’m not phrasing this correctly- I’m not up on Legalease!) for the father of my 3rd great-grandmother Susan William Lee Martin Kennedy. So I guess James H Martin would have been my 4th great-grandfather. Apparently someone thought this will was a forgery! Here’s page 1 of 5:
It’s gonna take me awhile to swim through this “language”, but I have already found a date and location of death for James H Martin, info that I didn’t have until now!
A bit about where this document came from: the Google News Archive search took me to a site called Fastcase, “the next-generation legal research system that offers unlimited access to a comprehensive 50-state and federal case law database.” What was freely available was basically a preview of my document, but it showed enough that I was able to determine that this was about my “s w l kennedy”. It cost $4.95 to get the entire 5-page document, but that was money very well spent!
Stay tuned!
Ruth, that is brilliant! I am really happy for you, can’t wait to hear more about this!
[...] OMG! The most amazing thing just happened and KENNEDY vs. UPSHAW and another, Supreme Court of Texas, June 18, 1886 by Ruth Stephens on the [...]