*We will also attempt to answer specific "one-question-at-a-time" queries. Queries must contain your full name, regular USPS mailing address & brief outline of your Tackett line back to your earliest known Tackett ancestor with each email request. It is also a good idea to send along some source record for your family in question that we can take a look at. These sources should be such records as transcriptions of Census, Marriage, Death, Deeds, etc., and not LDS Ordinance work or references to Broderbund or Ancestry files. Copies of Family Group Sheets are available on a fee basis. Five generation ancestor charts are available FREE, via email attachment, to any Tackett descendant who makes a request.
To all our East Kentucky kin: We also maintain a large database on many families allied to the Tacketts. Included on this list are: CAUDILL, OSBORNE, HALL, COOK, NEWSOME, DAMRON, HAMPTON, HAMILTON, MULLINS, AKERS, ADKINS, BRANHAM, BURKE, CASEBOLT, ELSWICK, HOPKINS, JOHNSON, LITTLE & MARTIN, plus many others. Almost all of our entries have been documented and not copied from LDS, Ancestry or Broderbund/FTM. We also have a library of almost every book printed for Pike & Floyd Co., KY, plus numerous original documents, ledgers and Old Reg. Baptist Church records. Our second largest collection contains material from the general area of Johnson/ Carter/ Boyd/ Greenup/ & Magoffin Counties in Kentucky.
We do not provide a "research service" but we will try to help out with additional information on your family lines. We have very extensive resources to draw from but requests should be very specific. In addition to over one hundred branch files containing thousands of FGS's (Family Group Sheets) and hundreds of photographs, we have thousands of Federal/State & County records filed alphabetically by county & state. Some of our sources have been computer filed, thus making them easier to retrieve. Some more common types of records may now be available online thru other sources and you may wish to check there first.
For copies of data from our Source Files accumulated since 1963, there is normally a 50¢ per page access or reproduction fee. These are not available online, but we can send these formatted to you via USPS mail or via rtf files as an email attachment. Please be very specific when requesting data. To order this material, we will normally need to know the county & state for which you are interested. If you don't know, we'll try to help. See additional details with each group as noted below. Many of these have been entered in our various computerized files, but thousands of others are still in hardcopy form:
1. Marriage Records: Over 7,000 Tackett related marriages indexed by husband & wife. (A file that grows weekly.) This file does not include all our marriages, but does contain most of the Old and Hard-to-Find marriages in our files. We'll be glad to look up any marriage from this file.
2. Census & Tax Records to 1870: This contains all tax records found to date from 1724 to 1870 and all Federal & State census enumerations from 1790 through 1870.
3. The 1880 & 1900 Federal Census. (The 1880 portion is complete and work is in progress for the 1900 portion.)
4. The 1910 Federal Census. We have all of these from the Soundex transcriptions.
5. Tackett Clippings: Three volumes completed of about 500 newspaper clippings each. We have several hundred more that have yet to be indexed.
6. Tackett Photo Index: We have begun to build a database for our several thousand Tackett family photos so these can be easily retrieved. A photo copy service is available for members. There is no charge to copy your old Tackett related family photos. [Editor, Jim W. Tackitt is a retired 30-year photo instructor who has specialized in photo reproductions and retouching.].
7. Social Security Death Benefit Records: We have available the entire list of Tacketts for whom death benefits were paid up thru 1988. The abstracts list name, year of birth, state from which the card was issued, year of death & state of residence at time of death. [Note: If your family members are not listed, it means that either he or she did not work under the Social Security system, or no one in the family applied for the benefits.] These records are now also available as a searchable database on the Internet via RootsWeb and other sites. As these are now available online, there is no longer a need for us to look this data up for members.]
8. Tackett Source Files: Thousands of misc. source records are filed alphabetically by State/County. If you wish to know if we have a record on file, the question should be specifically directed to a particular type of record in a County/State. As example, we probably would not be able to easily retrieve, if at all, a record if the question was written as, "Do you have any records for Elizabeth Tackett in Arkansas?" If, however, you asked for "a Marriage Record for Elizabeth Tackett in Searcy Co., AR before 1900," then we could easily check for this.
9. Tackett Branch Files: We have dozens of family branch file folders devoted to hardcopy material accumulated over the past 40+ years, many having been contributed by long deceased family members. These files contain a variety of records which may include: Family Group Sheets [for which there is a separate fee], letters, original & copy documents, audio tapes & photos. As fast as we are able, we have been entering these data into our computer genealogy files - but this will never be fully accomplished; there is just too much.
10. Church Records: Of interest to many descendants with origins in the Pike/Letcher/Knott/Floyd Co. area of KY will be our collection of annual Minutes of the New Salem & Union Assn's. of The Old Regular Baptist Church, with non-indexed transcriptions available back to 1813. Obits & Memorials for individuals began, as a regular feature, in the 1890's and we have nearly a complete collection up to present. Elder Wm. Tackitt Sr. was an early Moderator of this Church dating back to the the formation of The New Salem Assn. in 1826.
Our computer genealogy files were all originally maintained using the Mormon developed ™Personal Ancestral File (PAF). Due to some of the PAF limitations, we decided to seek an alternative program. After a great deal of study of the programs that had both Mac and Windows versions [™PAF, ™Reunion & ™Family Tree Maker], we decided that ™Reunion was the best alternative. The Windows version of ™Reunion was later sold to Sierra Software and their product was then called ™Generations. Leister now concentrates their efforts with the more versatile Mac based Reunion. These files contain over 121,000 individual entries.