.............Follow da Money
Where is the money? Historically (and in New York & Tokyo) the money is in the land, not in the skill. Visit Plymouth Plantation, and the residents will tell you, almost to a man, that they are farmers, and "oh, I shoe horses when needed" or "I build furniture when it's needed."
And with the money in the land, how does land change hands? Inheritance, marriage, "sale" to family, and, way down in the list of choices, sale to non-family.
A number of years ago, I was downstate Illinois to research both land and probate records. Working in the courthouse in an age when everyone was much more relaxed about access to records, I was shown the stairs to the basement, and told that probate was to the right and land to the left.... and please turn the light out when I came up.
The difference between the probate side and the land side was amazing, and made perfect sense when thought about for more than one second. All probate records were dead records; everything in those records had been settled, and if a question arose, looking for the answer could take time, and taking time would not be an issue.
On the other hand, literally, land records were current; these records were a deposit ticket which described their assets. Anyone in the county might need to get a record from yesterday or 15 years ago to 'do something' with the piece of land described on that piece of paper.
Probate was the archive. Land was the tickler file.
As a consequence, the probate side was, to put it mildly, quite untidy. On the land side, you could almost eat off the floor, and all the books were "just so."
TA
ps - I'm told that how you find out I've posted is changing in July. I will pursue, but right now this is a bit fuzzy how or what I need to do. The main thing is, I am not stopping writing, so if it seems I disappear, I've not! And it seems the address is still the same. Thanks for coming by and reading.
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on the other side - The country has crossed the one year mark with Covid last month. My time has gone into education, lots of education, via zoom, as courses pivoted (great word, right?) from live to on-line, and then worked again to add options to all the people itchy in their living rooms without travel to research. Starting to look forward to life after lockdown, but it's shape isn't in anyway clear.