"Another act provided for the division into counties of all the unorganized part of the state east of range line 26 west; the counties to be organized when they should have the requisite population. The counties created by this act were: Montgomery, Howard, Cowley, McPherson,Sedgwick, Sumner, Jewell, Mitchell, Lincoln, Ellsworth, Rice, Reno, Harper, Smith, Osborne, Russell, Barton, Stafford, Pratt, Barbour, Phillips, Rooks, Ellis, Rush, Pawnee, Kiowa, Comanche, Norton, Graham, Trego, Ness, Hageman, Ford, and Clark. By the same act Seward disappeared, and the boundaries of Greenwood, Butler and Marion were changed. Butler took its final form. The south line ofGreenwood was pushed nine miles south, to the north line of township 30. Marion was confined to one tier of townships on the south, taken from Butler (id. pp. 51-57)."

Prior to 1867, the land that is now Sumner County was in Butler County. For information prior to that, also search in Butler County records.

No history of Sumner County, or all of the southern border of Kansas for that matter, can be complete without talking about The Cherokee Strip Live Stock Association. Founded in 1883 in Caldwell, Kansas.

I know everyone's in a hurry to find Aunt Jane (so am I), but after you look for her here, check out some of the other links, especially the census transcriptions. Because of the difficulty I had in reading the handwriting (and the uniqueness of some of the census takers' spelling), it may be necessary to look at the actual census rather than doing a search. The links are below.