Finding old documents- Making His Mark

Part of working on the family tree is backing up info with real documents. It's one thing to say that someone was married on a particular day or year, but another thing to find that document in historical records. Record searching means writing a lot of letters, sending fees and paying postage, and a lot of waiting. Sometimes the waiting is to only have a letter returned as "no record found".
Another part of the hunt is: in what county or state did something happen in? Just because someone lived in one area at their death certainly doesn't mean that they were married or born there.
Records also include military service files, widows' pension files, newspaper accounts, and also US census records.
Part of what makes the search so fun is getting copies of very old documents back. Then the hard part begins, because old handwriting is very hard to read!
One thing I find interesting as time goes back, is how little our ancestors knew how to read and write. On many documents for Andrew Johnson, an ancestor in Illinois on my mother's side, he "made his mark". This was an "X" scratched in the presence of someone who could write, and they wrote his name around it. This was true of the affidavit he signed to marry his "minor" 20 year old son to Miss Elizabeth Yackey. Someone else wrote the document out, and his scribbly "X" signed it. Back then, many people didn't even know what they were signing, if the person who could read and write were unscrupulous.