Cabell County, West Virginia Genealogy

United States &gt; West Virginia &gt; Cabell County



Parent County
1809--Cabell County was created 2 January 1809 from Kanawha County. County seat: Huntington, as of 1887. Previous seats include Guyandotte and Barboursville.

Boundary Changes

 * Wayne County was carved from Cabell in 1842, while still part of Virginia.


 * Boone County was created in 1847 from parts of Cabell, Kanawha and Logan.


 * In 1867, parts of Cabell, Boone, Kanawha and Putnam were used to create Lincoln County, West Virginia.

Populated Places
The largest city is the county seat, Huntington (originally Cabell City). Other communities include Barboursville, Guyandotte, Ona, Salt Rock and Milton.

Neighboring Counties

 * Gallia County, Ohio
 * Lawrence County, Ohio
 * Lincoln
 * Mason
 * Putnam
 * Wayne

Cemeteries

 * The Heck Funeral Home, located in Milton, Cabell County, West Virginia, has served many individuals in Cabell County and surrounding counties. Thousands of alphabetically arranged abstracts of records are available online and may include age, birth, death, and burial dates and locations. Some records also include parents' names.


 * The Cabell County WV GenWeb site, listed below, has clickable links to cemeteries in Cabell County.

Census
1840


 * Turner, Ronald Ray. Cabell County West Virginia 1840 Census Alphabetically Arranged. 1995. Available online, courtesy: Prince William County Virginia website.

1850


 * Turner, Ronald Ray. Cabell County West Virginia 1850 Census Annotated. 1998. Available online, courtesy: Prince William County Virginia website.

Church
LDS Ward and Branch Records


 * Huntington

Local Histories
A very rare and valuable resource, little known to those not from this area, are the papers of Fred Lambert, housed at the Special Collections of Morrow Library, Marshall University in Huntington. Lambert wrote down oral family histories of hundreds of local families and the collection includes several boxes of his notebooks. Some, but not all, are indexed.

Newspapers
Huntington's daily newspapers included the Herald Advertiser (historical) and Herald-Dispatch

Taxation
At first glance, researchers might conclude that Virginia tax lists contain very little family history data, though one soon learns that valuable genealogical conclusions can be drawn from these records, nicknamed "annual censuses," such as: relationships, approximate years of birth, socio-economic status, identification of neighbors, the ability to distinguish between persons of the same name, evidence of land inheritance, years of migration, and years of death.

Virginia began enumerating residents' payments of personal property and land taxes in 1782. These two types of taxation were recorded in separate registers. Personal property tax lists include more names than land tax lists, because they caught more of the population. The Family History Library has an excellent microfilm collection of personal property tax lists from 1782 (or the year the county was organized) well into the late nineteenth century for most counties, but only scattered land tax lists. Microfilm collections at The Library of Virginia include land tax lists for all counties and independent cities for the years 1782 through 1978, as well as personal property tax lists for the years 1782 through 1930 (and every fifth year thereafter). Taxes were not collected in 1808.

Some tax records are available online or in print, though published abstracts often omit useful details found only in the original sources. Statewide indexes can help genealogists identify specific counties where surnames occurred in the past, providing starting points for research.


 * Schreiner-Yates, Netti. A Supplement to the 1810 Census of Virginia: Tax Lists of the Counties for which the Census is Missing. Springfield, Va.: Genealogical Books in Print, 1971. Available at FHL. [The source for this publication is the 1810 personal property tax list. Cabell County is included because the 1810 Census for that county has been destroyed.]
 * Ward, Roger D. 1815 Directory of Virginia Landowners (and Gazetteer). 6 vols. Athens, Georgia: Iberian Pub. Co., 1997-2000. Available at FHL. [The source for this publication is the 1815 land tax. Cabell County is included in Vol. 6.]

Societies and Libraries
KYOVA Genealogical and Historical Society, Box 1254, Huntington, WV 25714-1254 Library located at the second floor of the Second Presbyterian Church Building, 901 Jefferson Ave, Huntington, West Virginia Cabell County Public Library, 455 9th Street Plaza, Huntington, WV, 25701

Websites

 * Family History Library Catalog
 * Cabell County Public Library
 * Cabell County WV GenWeb
 * KYOVA Genealogical and Historical Society