COOPER COUNTY'S ORIGINS
           On a dark and stormy night on April 14, 1814, Sarshall Cooper lived in one of the angles of Cooper's fort located north of the Missouri River in present day Howard County.  While sitting around the fire with his family and friends an Indian made a hole in the fort just large enough to hold the muzzle of his rifle.  When the deed was done, Sarshall Cooper lay lifeless at the feet of his family.  Sarshall Cooper was a natural leader of men and a natural for the wilderness.  Instrumental in the settlement of the region, it was natural that when all of the land of Howard County, Missouri south of the river was to be formed into a new county; that the new county should be named after this frontiersman.  And on December 17, 1818 it became fact. 
           Cooper County as originally formed comprised the present day counties of Bates (Formed 1841 from Cass County), Benton (Formed 1835 from Pettis County), Camden (Formed 1841 from Benton County), Cass (Formed 1835 from Jackson County), Cole (Formed 1820 from Cooper County), Henry (Formed 1834 from LaFayette County), Jackson (Formed 1826 from LaFayette County), Johnson (Formed 1834 from LaFayette County), LaFayette (Formed 1820 from Cooper County), Miller (Formed 1837 from Cole County), Moniteau (Formed 1845 from Cole and Morgan Counties), Morgan (Formed 1833 from Cooper County), Pettis (Formed 1833 from Cooper and Saline Counties), St. Clair (Formed 1841 from Henry County), and Saline (Formed 1820 from Cooper and Howard Counties).
           The county seat and offices are located, on the banks of the Missouri River in Boonville. Cooper County is divided into the following townships: Lamine, Blackwater, Clear Creek, Otterville, Pilot Grove, Lebanon, Boonville, Palestine, Kelly, Clark Fork, North Moniteau, South Moniteau, Saline, and Prairie Home.
           We hope you enjoy your stay and we would love to hear from you.  Please send your comments, report programming errors, remit your suggestions, ask your questions, or send your help to James F. Thoma
MY HOME TOWN
           My Home Town, and it is, but this is Boonville's application video for the My Home Town makeover. I enjoyed it, and I think you will also enjoy it.
OUR NEIGHBORING COUNTIES
           Cooper County is located in the Central Missouri region. Our neighbors are: Boone, Howard, Moniteau, Morgan, Pettis, and Saline counties. They are all fine counties, but sometimes get a little touchy so I had to list them alphabetically. So once you have finished examing Cooper County, the next logical step would be to search the surrounding counties. Logically if your relatives lived near the county border; check the adjoining county. If your ancestors followed the migratory paths from say 1820 through 1910 then you might want to look in the counties of Pettis, Morgan or Saline. Following are the links to the adjoining counties (sorry the map is not a clickable map):
Howard County, Missouri

Saline County, Missouri

Pettis County, Missouri

Boone County, Missouri

Moniteau County, Missouri

Morgan County, Missouri
SEARCH THIS SITE
           To fully search for your ancestor or topics, you must utilize several search engines. The most important of these is the Free Find search engine. FreeFind indexes the entire Cooper County MoGenWeb site, which at the time of this writing includes in excess of 1750 documents covering many subject areas (e.g. marriage, church, census, cemetery, and military records) for Cooper County, Missouri.   The site is generally reindexed within a couple of hours after any significant new information is posted to the Cooper County MoGenWeb site.


  		   

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What's New?
           Currently 09 March 2020, we are working on getting more of our online files indexed by Free Find. We finally had time to go through the update logs and found lots of small files and four very large files that need to be fixed to allow indexing. Also in March we added the MyHomeTown video to the front page.

COOPER COUNTY GENEALOGY WEB A PART OF