Lorain County, Ohio Genealogy

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Parent County
1822--Lorain County was created 26 December 1822 from Huron, Cuyahoga, and Medina Counties. County seat: Elyria

Cities

 * Amherst
 * Avon
 * Avon Lake
 * Elyria
 * Lorain (formerly Charleston)
 * North Ridgeville
 * Oberlin
 * Sheffield Lake
 * Vermilion (eastern part) (formerly Harbortown)

Villages

 * Grafton (formerly Rawsonville)
 * Kipton
 * LaGrange
 * Rochester
 * Sheffield
 * South Amherst
 * Wellington (exempted)

Townships
All of the original townships in the county according to its present boundaries are listed below, along with their current name and/or the incorporated municipality that absorbed them in parenthesis. Townships that are completely absorbed are now defunct. These township names are still used in county land records.


 * Amherst (partially absorbed by part of the city of Amherst and the village of South Amherst) Includes locality of Whiskeyville.
 * Avon (completely absorbed by the cities of Avon and Avon Lake)
 * Black River (completely absorbed as part of the city of Lorain) Includes locality of Beaver Park.
 * Brighton Includes locality of Brighton.
 * Brownhelm (partially absorbed by parts of the cities of Lorain and Vermilion) Includes localities of Brownhelm and Brownhelm Station.
 * Camden (partially absorbed by the village of Kipton) Includes locality of Camden.
 * Carlisle (partially absorbed by part of the city of Elyria) Includes locality of LaPorte.
 * Columbia Includes localities of Beebetown, Columbia Center, Columbia Hills Corners, and Columbia Station.
 * Eaton (partially absorbed by part of the city of Elyria and part of the village of Grafton) Includes localities of Eaton, Eaton Estates, and North Eaton.
 * Elyria (partially absorbed by part of the city of Elyria) Includes locality of Vincent.
 * Grafton (partially absorbed by part of the village of Grafton) Includes localities of Belden and Erhart.
 * Henrietta Includes locality of Henrietta.
 * Huntington Includes locality of Huntington.
 * LaGrange (partially absorbed by the village of LaGrange)
 * Penfield Includes locality of Penfield.
 * Pittsfield (partially absorbed by part of the city of Oberlin) Includes locality of Pittsfield.
 * Ridgeville (completely absorbed by the city of North Ridgeville) Includes locality of Fields.
 * Rochester (partially absorbed by the village of Rochester) Includes localities of Bakers Crossing, Rochester Center, and Semples.
 * Russia (renamed to New Russia, partially absorbed by part of the city of Oberlin)
 * Sheffield (partially absorbed by parts of the city of Lorain, the entirety of the city of Sheffield Lake, and the village of Sheffield) Includes locality of Vincent.
 * Wellington (partially concurrent with exempted village of Wellington)

Neighboring Counties

 * Ashland
 * Cuyahoga
 * Erie
 * Huron
 * Medina

Cemeteries

 * Cemetery Inscriptions of Lorain County, Ohio (1980) compiled by Genealogical Workshop of the Lorain County Historical Society. Available broken down by cemetery from the Lorain County Chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society.  Comprehensive listing of gravesites and records for public cemeteries all over the county, from the arrival of the earliest settlers from the East on up to 1980. Contains valuable shortcut to finding information that may no longer be legible on original stones.

Churches

 * Pittsfield Community Church Originally two churches, the Pittsfield Methodist Church, formed in 1824, and the Pittsfield Congregational Church, formed in 1836 (and originally organized as the Evangelical Union Church of Christ), which built permanent structures in 1845 and 1846, respectively. Both buildings were destroyed in the Pittsfield Tornado of 1965, at which point both churches elected to combine into the Pittsfield United Church of Christ, which rebuilt by 1966.  The church became independent and was renamed Pittsfield Community Church in 1997.

Land
Land records are available from the County Recorder only at the Lorain County Administration Building, 226 Middle Ave First Floor, Elyria, OH 44035. Hours: M-F 8am-4:30pm. Phone: +1 (440) 329-5148.

Local Histories

 * A Pioneer History of Camden Township Written in the 1930s by local doctor F. E. Weeks, this is a series of short biographies of many Camden families. Primarily taken from oral interviews of older residents. Some families have extensive genealogies included. A very useful, if not always accurate source.
 * Lorain County Ohio Biographies User entered biographies, many from "A Standard History of Lorain County, Ohio..." v. 2, by G. Frederick Wright, Lewis Pub. Co.
 * History of Lorain County, Ohio (1879) Philadelphia: Williams Brothers.
 * The Early History of Lorain County Boynton, W W. Elyria, Ohio: Lorain County Agricultural Society, 1876.
 * Early history of Elyria and her people Webber, A R. Elyria, Ohio: Caxton Press, 1930
 * Reminiscences of Elyria, Ohio Hall, Mary B. Elyria, Ohio: Lorain County Historical Society, 1900.

Civil War
Civil War service men from Lorain County served in various regiments. Men often joined a company (within a regiment) that originated in their county. Listed below are companies that were specifically formed in Lorain County.


 * 1st Regiment, Ohio Light Artillery, Batteries B and E
 * 41st Regiment, Ohio Infantry, Companies F and H
 * 107th Regiment, Ohio Infantry, Company G

Newspapers
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers at the Library of Congress lists a plethora of local newspaper titles along with libraries and historical societies which retain archives of them. Please note that their listings are extensive, but not comprehensive, as local libraries may retain archives which are not listed.

Daily newspapers have been published since the 1800s in Elyria and Lorain. Elyria newspapers often published information and announcements relevant to the entire county (being that Elyria is the county seat) with much focus on areas in the central and southern parts of the county, including at times western Cuyahoga and Medina Counties, eastern Erie and Huron Counties and northern Ashland County. Lorain newspapers usually focused on the lakeshore communities. Information published in both cities often includes births and deaths, marriages and divorces, hospital discharges, legal notices, court filings, land transfers, and personal news (for example, "Mr. John Smith and family from Wellington spent the day with his mother-in-law, Mrs. Wm. Whitney in LaGrange on Saturday.").

Daily newspapers in Cleveland also cover news and events in Lorain County, including obituaries.


 * NewspaperArchive.com contains an extensive number of newspaper issues from both Elyria and Lorain, which are browseable and searchable, although not every issue of each newspaper is available (a fee is required, however it is availabe free of charge if accessed from this Elyria Public Library web page); their archives are also available with membership at |0*149|1*2|1*38|1*1811%26 Ancestry.com. Please note the following with regard to their search engine:
 * Newspapers in any one city may be archived under several different names and editions throughout the years, therefore, narrow searches down only to city (county is unavailable, except on Ancestry.com) and not to newspaper.
 * Over- or under-inflated numbers of search results will be returned if they exceed what will fit on one page.
 * If too specific a query is entered (which is very easy to do), no search results will be returned, and if too broad a query is entered, an overwhelming number of search results will be returned; therefore it is recommended to search only by date(s) and city, and using only one of the most likely unique words. For example, if looking for a reference to John Lyndes, search only for "Lyndes", as searching on "John Lyndes" will return every page that includes "John", making the search results excessively large.
 * Search results are presented by page, not by article, and relevance is determined purely on number of occurrences per page. Since newspaper pages are quite large and often include ads, this can make searching quite cumbersome for certain queries.
 * The search engine is not sophisticated enough to recognize synonyms when searching for names; for example, when searching for "Artemus Smith" or "William Jones", it will not also include results for "Artemas Smith" or "Wm. Jones", respectively.
 * Some pages were very faded, damaged, or omitted when scanned, therefore the indexing of the text is not always accurate, sometimes making manual browsing necessary. For example, "Hull" at times may be indexed as "Hall", or a faded section may appear as "11ull" or some other approximation, rendering the index useless.  Be aware that if pages were omitted during scanning, this may cause NewspaperArchive.com's page number to differ from the newspaper's actual page number.
 * Microfilm and original archives are kept at local libraries.

Weekly community newspapers have been published for over 100 years in Amherst, Oberlin, and Wellington. More recently, The Sun Sentinel covers Avon, Avon Lake, and North Ridgeville.


 * The Oberlin College Library Special Collections include fully-searchable images of the Oberlin News-Tribune from 1941-1945, and an index to three Oberlin newspapers from 1860-1936.

Obituaries

 * Oberlin High School obituaries from the 1800s to present.
 * Lorain County Obituaries More recent obituaries. Free.

Marriages
Marriage records from 1824 to present are available at the Lorain County Probate Court, 226 Middle Ave, Administration Bldg, 4th floor, Elyria, Ohio 44035. (440) 322-6367.


 * Staats, Chris. "Finding Lorain County Marriage Records Using the “Ohio Marriages, 1800-1958″ Database." Weblog post. Staats Place. 22 Dec. 20190. Web. &lt;http://www.staatsofohio.com/?p=1098&gt;

Deaths
Ohio Deaths, 1908-1953 Free name indexes and images at FamilySearch – Pilot. Records include such information as birth date of deceased, city, county, and state of death, name of spouse if married, names of parents, maiden name of mother, name of informant, if deceased was single, married, windowed or divorced, occupation of deceased.

Lorain County Probate Court Index Index of marriage records from about 1930 onwards (no dates until the late 1990s), probate birth records, and estate file numbers from the mid-20th century onwards.

Lorain County Records Retention Center PDF scans of probate court birth and death records from 1867-1908.

Lorain County Court of Common Pleas Searchable index useful in finding divorce records from the mid-1980s onwards.

Lorain County Probate Court Early Birth and Death Records Actual scanned images of original Court records, 1867-1908.

Societies and Libraries

 * 103rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry Society for descendants of soldiers who fought in this regiment during the Civil War.


 * Sheffield Village Historical Society
 * Lorain County Chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society

Web Sites

 * USGenWeb project. User-contributed birth, death, marriage, and court records, as well as obituaries.