-----Original Message----- From: George F. Riggin <[email protected]> 4Nov1768, recorded 16Nov1768 -- Som. L.R. 25:242 Deed -- John & Martha (his wife) Davis of Worcester Co. sold to Thomas Moor of Somerset Co. in consideration of complying with the condition of a bond executed 14Feb1744 by John Read Junr. who was the farmer husband of the afsd. Martha and for £8 - 150 acres of Green Meadow; witnessed by Jno. Scarborough, Ad. Spence, two Justices of the Peace; signed John Davis, Martha Davis. While John Reed Jr. (and heirs) are listed in the Somerset debt book from 1745 to 1761 with 75 acres of Green Meadow, I have seen no record of how he acquired it, or of the aforementioned bond. And while I don't like to assume (much too risky), it is tempting to consider that this is the same 150 acres of Green Meadow mentioned in John Callaway's 1755 resurvey as having been originally patented to James Givans 29Sep1694. However, proving that is above my present pay grade, and I'll have to leave this one to John. George _____________ Interesting pickup, George. I hadn't connected the dots here before, but this is actually a compelling pointer to Martha Read Davis as Martha, daughter of James Givan. This GREEN MEADOW was in what became Little Creek Hundred. Yes, the 1755 resurvey for John Callaway (So Patented Cert 1047) specifies it was a re-do of James Givan's 1694 patent. The little mystery with this one is that the Rent Rolls (Vol. 9, f. 170) for the Givan version is annotated: "original patent delivered in, for which rights is to be made good to the party again", which appears to be a conventional sort of request to abandon the property in favor of doing something else with the warrant rights. But there's no evidence that Givan actually did anything else with those rights. (Soon after having that survey done he and his brother Robert took up land on Rewastico Creek, where they settled in for the long haul, but their acquisition there was by deed, not requiring use of a warrant.) Then: nothing on GREEN MEADOW (by conveyance or probate mention) until the 1768 sale, which is *well after* the Callaway resurvey, and Callaway's selling off of parts to Moore and William Hitch in the mid-1760s. In short, the rights of Callaway to make the resurvey are a little murky. Nothing in the surviving land records demonstrates his acquisition of it. Perhaps an unrecorded deed, then. Warrant rights, normally rationalized in the certificate filings, make no mention of any title history. It may be that the prevailing Land Office regs (or decision-makers) were invoked here to clean matters up, by concluding that Givan's title was still "good", but I also imagine that the quitrents would have had to be paid up before everything was set right. What I think is that Moore figured out ca 1768 that the title to his part of GREEN MEADOW was a little cloudy and went off to find whoever who could legitimately assert rights, and came to Martha Davis. Martha Read Davis was by 1768 apparently a rare surviving offspring of James Givan, who had d. in 1724, leaving a total of eight children. Without going through all the Givan story, his several sons either expired or are hard to pin down later on, and - whatever those details - Martha was tagged "it", whence the 1768 release of GREEN MEADOW. She must have held the rights all along, or at least from the cited 1744 bond – however those rights came to her. Your note that 75 ac of GREEN MEADOW were paid by Read, et al., after 1745 is not something I'd noticed, but does say that this land had not dropped off the taxman's radar altogether. I also just noticed that Becky Miller’s “1744 Somerset Rent Rolls” also peg this GREEN MEADOW as 75 acres in John Read, Jr.’s hands [which she transcribed as “John Road”] with “75, ye remainder, taken by elder survey”. Whatever, all this sets the stage for the 1768 quitclaim. In short, this whole story is very helpful, as it essentially verifies Martha’s parentage when taken in context of a whole body of other evidence. See my next, too. John