Florida State Facts & Information

Florida, state in the southeastern United States, bordering the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, which is an arm of the ocean. Florida, sometimes called the Peninsula State, consists of a large low-lying peninsula and, in the northwest, a strip of land known as the panhandle. It is a region of low, rolling hills, vast swamps and marshes, numerous lakes, and extensive forests. Superimposed on this varied pattern of physical features are the farmlands, urban areas, transportation routes, and other cultural features that have transformed Florida from largely a wilderness area into one of the fastest-growing states in the Union. Florida entered the Union on March 3, 1845, as the 27th state. Beginning in the late 1800s development schemes brought a tide of new arrivals to the state, and the story of Florida since has been one of nearly continuous growth. The Official State website is at http://www.myflorida.com/

Between 1950 and 1970 Florida’s population experienced a phenomenal increase of 145 percent. Between 1970 and 1980 the population increased by another 43.4 percent, and by 32.7 percent between 1980 and 1990. Much of this increase was attributed to the large influx of people from elsewhere rather than natural increase. Many were people who had retired. Many were refugees from Cuba. Others came to work in the state’s new and expanding industries and to share in its general economic growth.

Tourism has been Florida’s major source of income for many years. Although it initially attracted visitors from the Northeastern states during the winter months, it is now a year-round vacationland visited by tourists from every state, Latin America, and also from Canada and other foreign countries. The most popular attractions are the theme parks around Orlando and the many resort cities that rim the coast. Their importance is reflected in the distribution of the state’s inhabitants, most of whom live in cities along the coast or in a corridor stretching between Tampa and Daytona Beach and including Orlando. While Jacksonville on the northern Atlantic shore is the state’s largest city in population, the state’s largest metropolitan area centers on Miami, near the southern tip of the state. Tallahassee, in the panhandle, is Florida’s capital.

The Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León called the region La Florida, roughly translated as Land of the Flowers, when he visited it in 1513. It is thought that he chose this name because he was impressed by the many colorful flowers of the region and because he sighted it on Easter, which is called Pascua Florida in Spanish. The state’s official nickname, the Sunshine State, reflects the economic importance of its climate, which has been called its most important natural resource. Among the other nicknames, all unofficial, are the Everglade State and the Orange State, for its most renowned crop.

"No man would immigrate into Florida-no, not from Hell itself," declared the Honorable John Randolph of Roanoke in the United States House of Representatives. The newly annexed territory was, he declared, "a land of swamps, of quagmires, of frogs and alligators and mosquitoes."

Nonetheless, Florida's 1980 census count of 9.7 million would mark it as the nation's seventh most populous state, and by 1987 it ranked fourth. Because native Floridians perpetually seem to be scarce (fewer than a third of the state's current inhabitants were born there), there is a persistent myth that few Americans outside the state today would have had Florida ancestors. Many of the settlers who flooded the state from Georgia and the Carolinas before and especially after 1821, however, eventually fled the swamps, alligators, and mosquitoes to return home or to migrate further west. Numerous "brick walls" in Southern genealogy have toppled when a missing ancestor or family suddenly turned up in Florida, either permanently or en route to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, or gold-rush California.

Many are surprised to learn that numerous living Americans can document their ancestry a full ten generations in Florida. Nearly fifteen hundred Florida pioneer lineages (those pre-dating statehood in 1845) have been identified and documented in the past decade alone.

The early history of Florida falls neatly into the following periods: 1513, discovery; 1565-1763, first Spanish colonial period; 1763-83, British colonial period; 1784-1821, second Spanish period; 1821-45, U.S. territorial period: and 1845, statehood as the twenty-seventh state.

The Spanish colonial presence began with the landing of Juan Ponce de Leon at Eastertide of 1513, ninety-four years before Jamestown, and Spanish Florida ultimately embraced all of the present state and much of the Gulf Coast, including Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

In 1564 French Huguenots settled Fort Caroline on the St. Johns River near present-day Jacksonville. The Spanish reacted immediately, by establishing St. Augustine as the first permanent European settlement in America and immediately destroying Fort Caroline. After further hostilities France soon abandoned designs on peninsular Florida. Elizabethan England, however, was not to be so easily intimidated.

Spain was to spend much of the seventeenth century attempting to dissuade the English by scattering colonists across Florida, and by the 1680s San Marcos de Apalache (now St. Marks) on the Gulf coast had grown to noteworthy proportions. In the final third of the century, pressure from the French to the west and the English and their Native American allies to the north prompted Spain to fortify St. Augustine and to re-establish a former settlement at Pensacola in 1698. In 1702 and 1703 there were numerous British raids. Seventeen years later the French took and briefly held Pensacola before relinquishing the town, joining with Spain against England, and finally retiring further westward along the Gulf Coast.

Following an indecisive treaty in 1748 and a decade of peace with Spain, England was again at war with France. By 1761 Spain, fearful that a French defeat could damage its own colonial interests, finally took sides with France, but it was too late. The Treaty of Paris, ending the Seven Years' War in 1763, saw Spain cede Florida to England in exchange for the captured city of Havana.

British East Florida reached from the Atlantic to the Apalachicola River; British West Florida ran from the Apalachicola to the Mississippi. In 1765 England sent Surveyor General William Gerard de Brahm and Royal Botanist John Bartram to the new possession and offered bounties, land grants, and other inducements to settlers. Thus East and West Florida remained loyal to Britain during the American Revolution, and St. Augustine became crowded with Tory refugees from Georgia and the Carolinas.

In 1781 Spain captured Pensacola from Britain, which two years later exchanged both Floridas for the Bahama Islands. Between 1785 and 1821 there were sporadic Spanish-American border disputes until the Pinckney Treaty of 1795 at last fixed the 31st parallel as the northern boundary of West Florida and gave the United States undisputed control of an area that now comprises nearly a third of Alabama and Mississippi.

Spain supported the British in the War of 1812 but never declared war on the United States. Nonetheless, Andrew Jackson seized and then abandoned Spanish Pensacola in 1814 and helped convince Spain of the folly of trying to hold an overseas colony contiguous to a large and unfriendly nation already coveting its lands. Under the terms of the Adams-Onis Treaty, which took effect in 1821, Spain gave up East and West Florida in exchange for American settlement of U. S. citizens' claims against Spain.

In 1821 Congress provided for a territorial governor, territorial courts, and a thirteen-member legislative council. The first two counties were established on 21 July 1821. By its first territorial census in 1830, three years before skeptical John Randolph of Roanoke died, Florida boasted 34,730 inhabitants. By statehood fifteen years later, its population had surpassed 66,500, and by 1990 Florida's "swamps and quagmires" were inhabited by more than thirteen million Americans.

The massacre of Army Major Francis Langhorne Dade and two companies of soldiers in December of 1835 marked the opening hostilities of the Second Seminole War, which would end seven years later after an expenditure of more than $20 million and the loss of 1,500 soldiers. By 1858, 3,824 Native Americans and blacks were relocated to Arkansas; Native American and white civilian casualties and property losses cannot accurately be calculated.

Florida attained statehood on 3 March 1845, first among the Atlantic coast colonies settled but last admitted to the Union. By then her people had lived under the flags of four sovereign nations: Spain, France, Great Britain, and the United States. Since attaining United States territorial status in 1821, Floridians had been "free." Under statehood, at long last they were "equal."

• Newspapers & Periodicals - The Newspapers & Periodicals Collection lets you discover a wealth of information about your ancestors from many historical newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals. These types of sources can often supplement public records and provide information that is not recorded anywhere else. Here, you can learn more about your ancestor's possible daily activities by placing them in the context of their time.
• Directories & Member Lists - Directories and member lists are typically compilations of information about people who belonged to various associations and groups or lived within city boundaries. They can be thought of as the predecessors to the modern-day phone book and usually list names, addresses, and sometimes the occupations of your ancestors.
• Stories, Memories & Histories - Stories and histories compiled by others researching a person or area can be an amazing source of information about your ancestors. Not only do they generally contain dates and places of vital events like birth, marriage, and death, but they often relate stories and memories that help you really get to know the character of your ancestors.
• Family Trees - Ancestry has thousands of family trees shared by other members. They can help you identify how ancestors are related and give you clues about birth, marriage, and death information. Family trees are an excellent resource for filling in gaps in your research or even to simply know where to begin.
• Pictures - One of the more exciting discoveries in doing family history research is finding a photograph of your ancestors or their residence. Finding historic postcard photos and drawings of towns and important events throughout history can also give you a visual look into your ancestors lives.
• Reference Materials & Finding Aids - Reference materials, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other how-to books, can be tremendously helpful in finding and interpreting historical documents. Many of these books can help you learn where to look for more information and how to use what you've already found to uncover more clues.

Florida County List

 

Among the records useful to the genealogist and usually held by the county courthouses are original marriage and divorce records. Probate court records include wills, administrations, bonds, inventories and appraisements, and guardianships. Land grants, homesteads, deeds, mortgages, and similar or related records are found in earlier individual books, but for a number of years in most jurisdictions such records have been combined into "Official Record" books. Recorded plat books, civil and criminal court dockets (case schedules) minutes, order books, naturalizations, incorporations, incompetencies, soldier and sailor discharge records, Confederate oaths of allegiance, delayed birth certificates, and marks and brands are all generally useful as well.

Deed, probate, tax and marriage records are available for most Florida counties. Other miscellaneous records are available for particular counties. They may include delayed birth certificates, birth and death records, family history, naturalization record indexes, court records, foreign judgments, homesteads, marks and brands, burial permits, cemetery records, and lists of registered voters.

Tax assessment lists and tax rolls, poll tax records (on free white males aged twenty-one and up) are helpful, as are listings of local lawyers, physicians, and dentists. Official minutes of county commissions, road and bridge trustees, and other taxing authorities may also be of interest. In the majority of counties, the original records are retained in the office of the clerk of courts located in the county seat. Choose from the counties below to view the county information.

Florida Discontinued Counties

 

This section provides an list of Florida counties that no longer exist. They were established by the state, provincial, or territorial government. Most of these counties were created and disbanded in the 19th century; county boundaries have changed little since 1900 in the vast majority of states.

• Benton County: Renamed from Hernando Co on 6 Mar 1844 and renamed Hernando Co on 24 Dec 1850
  Benton County maps from Exploring Florida website (47 Maps)
• Dade County: County renamed to Miami-Dade Co on 13 Nov 1997
• Fayette County: Formed in 1832, Abolished in 1834, Territory annexed to Jackson County
• Mosquito County: Mosquito County as formed in 1824 and renamed Orange County in 1845
• New River County: Formed in 1858, Renamed Bradford County in 1861
• St. Lucie County: Formed in 1844, Renamed Brevard County in 1855

Florida Burned Courthouses

 

The destruction of courthouses greatly affects genealogists in every way. No only are these historic structures torn from our lives, so are the records they housed: marriage, wills, probate, land records, and others. Once destroyed they are lost forever. Even if they have been placed on mircofilm, computers and film burn too. The most heartbreaking side of this is the fact that many of our courthouses are destroyed at the hands of arsonist. However, not all records were lost.

   Below is a list of Florida Counties and the years the Courthouses were subjected to a disaster. This does NOT mean that ALL RECORDS were lost. Often, folks took their documents again in for recording after a disaster and later deeds will contain long chains of title, etc.

• Baker County - courthouse, constructed in 1888, was lost to fire.
• Bradford County - The original Lake Butler courthouse was burned in 1865, reportedly to destroy a murder indictment along with all other county records. A second courthouse burned in 1875,
• Brevard County - Record Loss, unknown causes
• Calhoun County - Record Loss, unknown causes
• Clay County - Court was held in McRae House which burned in 1872 and with it most of the county's judicial records.
• Columbia County - Numerous prior courthouses, most if not all constructed from logs, fell victim to arsonists in 1848, 1860, 1867, and 1874. Most early records were destroyed.
• Dade County - Record Loss (Court)
• Duval County - was burned during the Civil War, burned in 1901. Extent of reocrd loss unknown.
• Franklin County - destroyed by fire in 1887
• Gadsden County - burned in 1849, supposedly an act of arson by a Forbes family slave.
• Hamilton County - may have been destroyed by a tornado prior to 1836. Courthouse was destroyed by fire in 1929 and rebuilt in 1932.
• Hernando County - destroyed by fire in 1877
• Hillsborough County -
• Holmes County - Courthouse at Cerro Gordo also burned at least once in the 1870's. Westville Courthouse burned in 1902, and most early county records perished with it.
• Jackson County - courthouse was destroyed by fire on November 30, 1848. All records were destroyed
• Lafayette County - courthouse caught fire on New Year’s Eve, 1892, apparently the result of a drunken prank.
• Madison County - The first Madison courthouse burned in 1876 and was replaced by one built in 1880 of brick. This building burned as well, in 1912, and was replaced in 1913 by the present courthouse
• Orange County - The first Orange County Courthouse, a two-story hewn-log affair, was burned in 1868.  Most of the books and records were destroyed. 
• Santa Rosa County - Record Loss (Marriage & Probate)
• Wakulla County - Record Loss (Marriage & Probate)
• Walton County - Record Loss (Marriage & Probate)
• Washington County - Record Loss