Ancestry Magazine

While it’s true that records of private attorneys can contain valuable information about an ancestor, particularly when that ancestor was the attorney’s client, two problems arise that tend to render these records unlikely and inaccessible sources.
The first problem involves finding information from the attorney holding the records—the process is difficult at best, and the odds are stacked against a successful outcome. The second problem involves access—when trying to obtain attorney records, privacy and property rights and legal ethics stand in the way.
Plus, there are further complications. The information an attorney holds in client files is generally either the client’s property, or it is subject to the client’s consent for use. Anything that is not subject to these restrictions is usually so intermingled that separating it out isn’t practical. The same considerations also apply to information held by court-appointed or legal-aid agency attorneys representing indigent clients.
A search for information from attorneys’ files should be considered a last resort—and without much hope that it will yield anything useful in the end.
But all is not lost if your ancestor had problems of a legal nature. Whether the legal matter was civil or criminal, the most accessible sources of information are papers retained by the family, public records held by a court, and local newspapers. Both court records and newspapers are accessible, and there’s a good chance that they’ve been indexed (even if the newspaper is no longer published, a local historical society may have indexed names and topics in the publication). And thumbing through your family’s paperwork is almost guaranteed to turn up more interesting clues.