Above is a picture of the hand-written records of the transfer of property from the County Clerk's Office of DeKalb, back to the early twentieth century! The first record we have is a Mr. MS Overton selling to Annie Bates on October 8th, 1910. It takes some patience to go through all of the records and try reading the cursive writing. Earlier than 1910, DeKalb Countyrecords are by the grantor/grantee (seller/buyer)'s names rather than by the property. This creates a much more laborious process, especially if the property goes through the family or if there are people with similar names.
Even if we are able to track the transfer of property, however, that does not tell us who was actually living on the land, if they built on it, or what they did with it at all. It does give us hints, however, of the social structure throughout time, so when we have more information we can try to understand more about the situation in which the people at West and Short lived.
The above is a picture of a hand-drawn map that was made by a former resident of Shabbona Grove. Although it isn't as formal of a document as historians are used to, it provides much more detail about what we're interested in: the people who lived here. This document represents a memory of a childhood long past; we must give allowance to accidents and inaccuracies. Many historical archaeologists rely on fire insurance maps to accurately show where buildings were in the early part of the 20th century. Shabbona Grove was in decline by the begging of the 20th century, however, so only the part of town closest to the railway was recorded. We have no formal documents that record the building, distruction, or inhabitation of the properties between West and Short that I know of. (But if you think differently, I'd love to be proved wrong!!)
We still don't know who lived on these properties. But hopefully our investigations can shed a little bit of light on this murky situation.
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