Welcome to Beckham County, KY History and Genealogy Presented by Kentucky Genealogy Trails a part of Genealogy Trails Volunteers Dedicated to Free Genealogy This Site is Available for Adoption Our goal is to help you track your ancestors through time by transcribing genealogical and historical data for the free use of all researchers. We're looking for folks who share our dedication to putting data online and are interested in helping this project be as successful as it can be. If you are interested in joining Genealogy Trails, view our Volunteer Page for further information and then contact Kim. (Enough knowledge to make a basic webpage and a desire to transcribe data is required) We regret that we are unable to perform personal research for folks. All data we come across will be added to this site. We thank you for visiting and hope you'll come back again to view the updates we make to this site. If you would like to be kept informed of our state and county website updates, subscribe to any or all of our mailing lists Kentucky is covered under our "Southern" States mailing list.   COUNTY HISTORY Beckham County, Kentucky was formed by the Kentucky General Assembly on February 9, 1904. It was created in the northeastern part of the state from parts of Carter County, Kentucky, Lewis County, Kentucky and Elliott County, Kentucky. The county seat was Olive Hill, Kentucky. A man named C. V. Zimmerman filed suit against Beckham County - specifically against its county judge, Captain C. C. Brooks - when Beckham County tried to collect a $75.00 debt from Zimmerman. Zimmerman claimed that under an 1891 Kentucky Constitutional amendment, creation of Beckham County was unlawful because it left other counties with less than 400 square miles of land, and that Beckham County itself also had less than 400 square miles of land. Carter County joined Zimmerman's suit and added the claim that the creation of Beckham County ran its borders too close to the county seats of Carter and Lewis counties, violating the 10 mile minimum. Carter County also claimed that the illegal creation of Beckham County would unfairly deprive Carter County of tax revenues that rightfully belonged to Carter County. Beckham County was dissolved by the Kentucky Court of Appeals on April 29, 1904 because it was not created in conformance with state law. Marriage and postal records from the brief existence of Beckham County still exist. The county records are kept in the Carter County courthouse. [Source: Wikipedia.org] ONLINE DATA Marriages Postal Records SURROUNDING COUNTIES Carter, Lewis, Elliott Back to Kentucky Trails Visit Our National Genealogy Trails Site Subscribe to our mailing lists to get notification when we update this and our other Southern websites. Copyright © Genealogy Trails All data on this website is Copyright by Genealogy Trails with full rights reserved for original submitters.