Research Tips

Researchers may use both browse and search capabilities to locate records in the Travis County Clerk Digital Archives.

Browsing
If you know the type of record and date range of record you’re looking for, it may be most efficient to browse for relevant records by clicking “EXPLORE RECORDS” in the upper right of this page. The records are grouped into several collections by record type. You can then click deeper into those collections until you find the book or record that meets your needs.

If you’re trying to locate specific county records that are recorded in a ledger book, you will need to start by referencing the record’s respective index book. For more information on how to use index books to locate historic records, see the “Using Index Books” section below.

Searching
Use the search bar at the top right of this page to search the descriptive metadata or catalog terms applied to the records in the archives. This will also search the full text of any typewritten records in the Archives. To search for an exact phrase, place the phrase in quotation marks in the search bar. Our search also supports Boolean search operators, such as AND, OR, NOT, and AND NOT.

FULL TEXT SEARCH NOTE: The majority of the ledger books are handwritten, and therefore not full text searchable. Optical character recognition (OCR) has been run on all typewritten records, including typewritten transcripts of several older handwritten books, enabling full text searching of those particular books only. However, do note that OCR can be unreliable for documents written with a typewriter, due to variations in letter spacing and alignment.

Using Index Books
The best way to locate specific county records in ledger books is to first start with the record’s respective index book. Index books will most often be limited to a set date range and grouped alphabetically by the name of a person or business that was party to the case or transaction. The index entry will then refer the researcher to the volume and page number of the book where the record is recorded. Then, browse through the Digital Archives to locate the referenced volume and scroll through the pages to the referenced page within that volume. For additional information on how a particular index is organized, refer to the book’s description notes.

INDEX ALPHABETIZATION NOTE: Many index entries are only approximately alphabetized, meaning entries appear in groupings that are close to each other alphabetically, but are not in exact alphabetical order. For example, every groom with the last name “Carter” will likely not be listed together from Aaron to Zachary in a marriage license index. Instead, the Carters will be scattered among other last names starting with C. So, you may need to skim through several index pages before finding the entry you’re looking for.

If the record book referenced in the index isn’t yet available in the Digital Archives, you can contact us at [email protected] to request a PDF copy of the record. In your email, please include the record book’s title, as well as the volume and page number of the record. Additionally, many of these record books are also available on the University of North Texas Portal to Texas History.