Finding Your Ancestor’s Home Town (or Not).

Queries from people who live outside of Southeastern Indiana often ask for information about the town their ancestor lived in. My ancestor died or was born in Barbersville or lived in Wirt? What can you tell me about the town? The answer depends on the answer to the following question. What is a town, anyway? If you mean incorporated municipalities with governments, there are only two that still exist in Jefferson County: Hanover and Madison, and in Switzerland County, there is only Vevay. These places have elected officials and taxing authority. (Let’s not confuse the issue too much with the townships, which have some officials and taxing authority, but which aren’t incorporated municipalities.)
Towns such as Madison, Vevay, and Hanover were established through formal plats—legally recorded maps that show the number of lots and their size, and any streets. There are other platted towns that survive as small population centers. These include Brooksburg, Canaan, Deputy, Dupont, Kent, Paris, and Wirt in Jefferson County; Allensville, Bennington, Center Square, Florence, Markland, Moorefield, Mount Stirling, and Patriot in Switzerland County. In the cases of some platted towns, such as Bryantsburg, only a handful of houses remain. There are others that are only memories, such as Barbersville. In terms of government, the most many of these places could claim is that a justice of the peace held court there during the nineteenth century and perhaps into the early twentieth.
There are some that were absorbed into the City of Madison as it grew: Fulton, North Madison, and Berlin. There were many towns that were platted that disappeared or never developed. These include Bethleham, Concord Cynthiana (in Switzerland County), Edinburgh, New Danville, New London, Pittsburgh, and Vienna.
Can you determine if your ancestor actually lived within the boundaries of a platted town? Sometimes. Madison and Vevay were always enumerated separately from the townships which surround them, at least from the 1850 census on. But the practice was erratic for smaller places such as Bryantsburg, Canaan, Bennington, and Moorefield. Bryantsburg is counted in 1870 and 1880; Canaan was counted in 1850 and 1800, but not in 1860, 1870, or 1900. Moorefield was not separately listed in 1850, 1860, or 1870, but was in 1880 and 1900. Bennington was not counted in any of these censuses.
Sometimes populations are listed for these centers, particularly in the Historical Atlas of Indiana, published in 1878. For example, it gives the population of Barbersville as 100. But how is that possible since Barbersville was never officially counted? It appears the total includes the number of people (perhaps just landowners and their families) with Barbersville addresses.
Finally, there are the locations that take their names from former post offices. In the rural setting of southern Indiana these are the most numerous and produce the most confusion about the number of towns that have existed. There have been stories in the Madison Courier about the supposed large number of towns that no longer exist (at least two stories in the last 15 years.) The basic problem is these stores confuse locations with towns and that confusion stems from our modern idea of a post office, a facility that exists in (often brick) structure. But that was not the way post offices operated through the nineteenth century and part of the early twentieth. Post offices were located in the post masters’ homes or in facilities the post masters operated such as stores, blacksmith shops, and mills. When the post master changed, the post office moved to the facility of the next appointee.
Some of these former post office sites still can be found county maps: China, Foltz, Manville, Volga, and Wakefield. Others are generally lost like Wise and Sugan. What is confusing is that maps that were issued years after these post offices were closed still identify these sites by squares that look as if they were towns. Some of these locations maintained their identity because of the existence of churches, stores, or schools. (Lists of post offices for Jefferson and Switzerland County have been posted on the respective GenWeb pages with periods of operation and names of first postmasters.)
What does this mean from a records point of view? There are not many local records available since most places were not incorporated. There are records for Madison, many in the hands of the Jefferson County Historical Society. The society’s archives index shows it has, among other holdings, city court records from 1816 to 1885 and tax duplicates from 1844 through 1906. There are also tax appraisal lists for Madison. Most of these, however, are not available unless you visit the society’s headquarters in Madison. The township records are spotty. I am aware of the existence of dog licensing records for Shelby Township (Largely to collect money which was paid to people whose sheep were killed by dogs) and some marriage records that largely duplicate county records. But these were in private hands and if records for other townships exist, they are also in private hands.

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