An old court case I found in district court records has nothing to do with genealogy, but much to do with people. In 1840, a man was tried for murdering another man who refused to abide by a promised land deal. Court papers go into great detail, with many "whereas" and "the above stated" on the stabbing, with information on the knife "of the value of one dollar," with a blade eight inches long and where the now deceased man was stabbed, said wound being one-quarter inch wide. During jury selection, defense and prosecutor challenged almost all potential jurors, until only eight men remained. The judge told the sheriff to go out and fine four good and qualified men, which the sheriff did. Jurors heard one day of testimony, then adjourned for another full day of deliberation before telling the judge they could not reach a verdict. The judge declared mistrial, with a new trial scheduled for the next court session. Between the trials, the accused man's divorce case came to court,! with two jurors from the murder trial on the divorce jury. The accused murderer was granted divorce. At the second murder trial, jurors deliberated a short time and then returned a verdict of not guilty. The dead man left a widow and three children. After that trial, a civil case came to court, in which the declared not guilty man sought to get the land he was originally promised, and which led to the killing. When all was done, the accused man's brother got his part of the land as promised, but the widow of the murdered man received the exact same acreage as promised the man who (according to the jury) did not kill her husband. After going through all manner of 1840s pieces of paper and the big court records and finding the verdict, I figured that story was like most others - One I read and would never hear about again. Not so. A year or so ago, I was in the district clerk's office here in Sulphur Springs. I happened to see an old book marked "Probate." I checked a few pages from the mid-1840s, and then what before my wondering eyes did appear but the not guilty man filing in Hopkins County to be named guardian of the three children of the man he did not kill (so the jury said). I checked all the pages forward until discovering that at the next meeting of the court, the man did not appear, and guardianship was not granted. There is, in that story, an entire novel of frontier life -- of promises made and not kept, of the consequences when a man did not keep his word, of the frontier legal system, of who knows what kind of machinations between the trials, of possible collusion between men and women not married to each other-It's a good story. Another good one is about the girl who turned 12 (or 13) in 1836 and got married and after the deaths of her husband, her brother and her sister, and she inherited a big chunk of land, later sold the same piece of property to two different men. Bob Merriman