Spurlin research resources

This page gathers resources for people researching the Spurlin surname and its variants (Spurling, Sparlin, Sparling). Most of these sites are user-contributed genealogy, so their family trees and dates should be checked against original records.

Collaborative family trees

WikiTree's Spurlin surname page gathers profiles for people born or married into the name.^[1] In September 2026, WikiTree's public search matched about 3,800 profiles under Spurlin and similar spellings. The first 1,300 results included 342 people whose surname at birth was exactly "Spurlin." Grouped by birthplace (or place of death when no birthplace was given), the largest groups were North Carolina (65), Alabama (37), Arkansas (about 30), Georgia (26), Texas (23) and Illinois (19).^[1] These counts are a rough snapshot of a user-contributed database, not a census. FamilySearch's surname page calls Spurlin an English variant of Spurling, citing the Dictionary of American Family Names. The page reported 2,356 people named Spurlin in the FamilySearch Family Tree and 364,699 historical records for the name.^[2] FamilySearch also publishes read-only public pages for people in its shared tree at ancestors.familysearch.org, which can be viewed without signing in. They list attached sources such as census entries and Revolutionary pay vouchers.^[3] For a state-by-state summary of the main family lines, see Spurlin family lines by state.

DNA

The FamilyTreeDNA project (see Sperling/Spurling DNA surname project) covers Spurlin, Spurling, Sparlin and Sparling. Its public results page sorts members into lineage groups. Lineage 1 is for descendants of Jeremiah Spurling of Virginia (listed as 1667–1725), and most of its members are in haplogroups R-BY141437 and R-FGC13959. It has six Spurlin and Spurling testers, including a descendant of "Big John" Spurlin of Lincoln County, North Carolina (see "Big John" Spurling and the Spurlin DNA Project). Lineage 2 covers John Sparling/Sperling of New Jersey and the Spurlings of Hampshire County, Virginia.^[4] Outside the two lineages are an unmatched "Unknown Spurling" tester and a Spurley tester with a predicted E-M96 haplogroup, so the testers who carry the surname fall into at least four separate paternal lines. Not every family with the surname descends from one ancestor.^[4][5] The other ungrouped members, in haplogroups such as I-M253 and T-M70, carry other surnames, such as Switzer and Benningfield.^[4] FamilyTreeDNA's free Discover pages give age estimates for individual branches. They estimate that the common ancestor of the Lineage 1 branch R-BY141437 was born around 1700 CE.^[6]

Forums, mailing lists and link directories

The Genealogy.com (formerly GenForum) Spurlin board holds 95 posts. Its threads include Beaver Creek in Taney County, Missouri; Thomas N. Spurlin of North Carolina and Clay County, Alabama; and Green K. Spurlin, born in 1795 in Georgia.^[7] One 2003 reply discusses John and "Myally" (Mily) Spurlin, the North Carolina couple named in the Cleveland County, North Carolina, family history (see the "Spurlins of Cleveland and Rutherford Counties, North Carolina" entry). It cites a 1772 Orange County, North Carolina, deed signed by John and Mily Spurling. It also cites a family Bible, recorded in DAR lineage papers, that names William Spurlin (born 1769) as their son.^[8] Ancestry.com's Spurlin surname message board had 73 threads and 249 messages in September 2026.^[9] RootsWeb's surname message boards are indexed at boards.rootsweb.com.^[10] Linkpendium's Spurlin page links to Shelby County, Indiana, birth and marriage indexes and to gravestone photos of Spurlins in Linn County, Oregon, and Bossier Parish, Louisiana.^{[11][12][13][14]}

County histories and newspapers

Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century county histories on the Internet Archive contain several Spurlin biographical sketches. Among them are Hardin County, Iowa (1883); Cass, Miami, Howard and Tipton counties, Indiana (1898); and Fentress County, Tennessee (1920).^[15][16][17] Later heritage books, such as The Heritage of Cleveland County (N.C., 1982), include family articles written by descendants.^[18] Many small-town newspapers can be searched in full text on the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress's Chronicling America site. Examples include the Elba Clipper of Coffee County, Alabama, and the Hopkinsville Kentuckian.^[19][20] In September 2026 a Chronicling America search for "spurlin" returned 4,599 pages, and the Library of Congress also serves its search results as JSON (see Spurlins in historic newspapers).^[21] The Internet Archive's copy of William Henry Perrin's Counties of Christian and Trigg, Kentucky (1884) is an example of a county history that is free to read in full. It names Spurlin pioneers and preachers in its church histories.^[22] Modern obituaries are indexed on Legacy.com.^[23]

Land, cemetery and marker records

• Federal land patents. The Bureau of Land Management's General Land Office (GLO) Records site indexes the patents by which the United States passed public land to private owners. A search in September 2026 found 94 patents to people surnamed Spurlin, issued between 1823 and 1963, most of them for land in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana (see Federal land patents to Spurlins).^[24]
• Cemeteries. Find a Grave's cemetery search lists eight burial grounds with Spurlin in their names, in Arkansas, Tennessee, Indiana, Kentucky and North Carolina (see Spurlin cemeteries).^[25] Its memorials are user-contributed, and a memorial count is not a burial count.
• Historical markers. The volunteer-run Historical Marker Database (HMdb) returned nine markers and memorials naming a Spurlin in September 2026, among them church founders, lodge officers and veterans (see Spurlin historical markers).^[26]

Military and African American records

For Confederate service, FamilySearch's research guide and the National Park Service's Soldiers and Sailors Database are the usual starting points (see Spurlins in the Civil War).^[27][28] For the Second World War, the National Archives has put online the War Department's 1946 state-by-state honor lists of Army and Army Air Forces dead and missing, and the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) burial database can be searched by surname. Spurlins appear in both: the Alabama list includes two, and the ABMC database lists two Second World War soldiers named Spurlin buried in its cemeteries in Italy and the Philippines (see Spurlins in the World Wars).^[29][30] Records of the Freedmen's Bureau (1865–1872) can be searched through FamilySearch and the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. They are the main federal source for tracing formerly enslaved people who took or were recorded under surnames like Spurlin.^[31][32] This research did not find any published Freedmen's Bureau transcription that names a Spurlin family. The best-documented African American Spurlin line on this wiki is that of Owen and Amanda Spurlin of Mississippi.