The Herndons An Atlanta Family

Working With the Herndon Family Records in Atlanta

If you are researching the Herndon line in the Atlanta area, the first thing you need to know is that records are scattered across multiple repositories and some of them are in rough shape. I have spent years pulling census fragments, probate files, and deed books for this family, and the process is not straightforward. There is no single index that covers everything. I will walk through the practical steps I use when working with this family. The main challenge is that the Herndons in metro Atlanta show up in at least three distinct branches that overlap in time and geography. If you assume they are all one group, you will mix up fathers and sons and waste a lot of hours. The branch I deal with most often descends from John Herndon who settled in DeKalb County around 1830. His children appear in the 1850 census living near what is now Decatur. The problem starts immediately because there is another John Herndon in the same county born a decade later. You can tell them apart by the property descriptions. The older John held land near the old Atlanta & Charlotte Air Line rail corridor. The younger one shows up in tax records near the old Covington Turnpike.

When I am building out the family tree, my first move is always to pull the tax digests before the census. I found this works better because the tax records list exact land parcels and transfer dates. The census alone just gives you a name and an age range, which is almost useless when three different John Herndons are in the same township. I use the Georgia Department of Revenue old tax roll database first, then cross-reference with the county probate records at the DeKalb Public Library archives. One edge case that caught me for months involved a marriage license from 1872 that seemed to point to a daughter who never appeared in any census. I spent weeks chasing a Sarah Herndon who apparently did not exist in the records I was looking at. The issue turned out to be a clerical error on the license itself. The name was recorded as "Herndon" but she was actually a byrd who had recently married into the family. The workaround was to pull the original bond application from the probate file instead of relying on the indexed marriage record. The bond document had the correct maiden name and the father's name listed, which let me place her correctly. Always check the bond or license application, not just the certificate. Another thing nobody warns you about is the spelling variation. Herndon shows up as Hernden, Hernidon, and occasionally Herdon in handwritten records. If you are searching electronically, make sure your search engine allows for phonetic matching or use wildcard terms. The Georgia state archive search tool defaults to exact match, which will make you miss entire branches. I keep a running list of all spelling variants in a simple spreadsheet and search each one separately.

For the Atlanta specific records, the main repositories are the DeKalb County Probate Court, the Georgia Archives in Atlanta, and the Atlanta History Center. The Atlanta History Center has a small but useful collection of Herndon family papers donated in the 1990s. These include letters and a handwritten family bible record that fills gaps between 1860 and 1880 where the census data is thin. The Georgia Archives has the civil war pension files for Herndon soldiers, which are valuable for confirming relationships because the affidavits often name siblings and parents. Here is a practical workflow I follow:

• Start with the 1850 and 1860 census for DeKalb County and note every Herndon household.
• Pull tax digests from 1845 to 1870 to map land ownership over time.
• Check probate records for any Herndon who died between 1850 and 1900. Wills and estate files are where you find the family relationships.
• Look at church records. The Herndons in this area were mostly Baptist and Methodist. The First Baptist Church of Decatur has baptism and membership rolls going back to the 1840s.
• Use the cemetery records to confirm death dates and family plots. The Herndon plots at Mount Olive Cemetery in Decatur have headstones that list relationships going back to the founding members.

There are limits to what you can verify with the surviving records. The 1890 census fire destroyed a large portion of the federal census returns, so any Herndon who lived through that year is harder to track. Slave schedules and antebellum records for this family are also incomplete. The Herndons owned enslaved people, and the records that do survive are fragmentary. If you are researching enslaved ancestors connected to this family, you will need to work with manumission records, Freedmen's Bureau documents, and postwar labor contracts instead of standard census data. If you want to start downloading or accessing these records, the Georgia Archives website has a digitized collection of some probate and land records. DeKalb County has begun digitizing their probate files, but the coverage is uneven. The Atlanta History Center allows research appointments, and their online catalog lists the Herndon papers accession number as AC.1994.12.7. I also recommend the Georgia Generations website for transcribed census and tax data, though you should verify anything you find there against the original documents. The biggest mistake people make is trying to connect this Atlanta line to other Herndon families in Georgia or the Carolinas without solid documentary proof. There are Herndon lines in Middle Georgia and South Carolina that share the same common ancestors several generations back. Until you have a paper trail that links your specific ancestor to the DeKalb County branch, treat those connections as speculative. I have seen too many family trees get rewritten because someone assumed a connection without checking the probate files first.

One more thing that helps is keeping a log of every source you check, even the dead ends. I use a simple reference manager with tags for repository, record type, and date range. When you are pulling records from multiple counties and dealing with overlapping names, it is easy to lose track of which file came from where. A clean citation system saves you from having to re-pull the same document three months later because you forgot where you found it.