marjorie adams <marjea@wildblue.net> wrote: >Would you be able to tell me: >How far south of St. Martin's River did Showell's "Cropton" extend in >today's terms? >Where was Walton's "Neighborhood" in relation to Trappe? >Where was/were the "Patrick's Lott" (s) detailed previously? >  Could a lease be acquired for oneself AND heirs, and then be "sold" for >profit by the heirs? >By 1740 when a property of 100A+ is found on plats.net assigned to an >individual  was it usually vacant up to that time or was it usually part of >a larger property patented earlier? (I have seen deeds where the surveyor >adds some vacant contiguous property but usually under 50A.) >After 1776 when the properties patented in MD came under DE jurisdiction, >was there any attempt to transfer original documents to DE or did  they >remain in the MD records? > >There has been discussion on this list in the past about your plans for >making you data available for others to research.  Do you have any definite >plans to do so? ____________________ You’ve asked at least six questions. Geniis only have to answer three. My bells were already all rung... CROPTON: centered at 38/34/27N, 75/13/09W NEIGHBOURHOOD: centered at 38/18/31N, 75/07/35W PATRICKS LOT: centered at 38/19/21N, 75/12/02W. Private leases are a matter on which I have no reliable data. They appear rarely in the official documentary records. I would imagine that they were governed by whatever applied to contract law and any stipulations among the parties. I’ve never seen a sublease in the Provincial records. Warrants came in various kinds: “common” warrants for previously unclaimed land (known as “vacant”), and “special warrants” of different sorts for land which had some prior history. Some were special warrants of resurvey to consolidate a new owner’s contiguous holdings, and/or perhaps correcting defects in earlier surveys, and/or adding contiguous vacancies. Some were warrants for escheat land (which had reverted to the Province for failure of earlier owners to keep up annual quitrent, some were “warrants on the proclamation” (a similar, but specific, sort of situation), and on and on. You can see instantly in the Original Certificates in plats.net what sort of warrant applied in the opening statement by the surveyor on the face of the survey description. If it mentions no “special” circumstance, it was a “common” warrant for vacant land, never earlier occupied. If a resurvey, the surveyor - depending on the time frame - was required to record with then-dictated specificity the parents (or parts of parents) being resurveyed, including any corrections and overlaps (interferences) among predecessors which he found. For exotic conditions like escheat, he made other notations of what he was fixing in the documentary record. This is a vast, deep subject, about which what I know comes from (a) having processed nearly 12,000 survey records and (b) what’s in John Kilty’s Land Holder’s Assistant (see Volume 73 of the Archives of Maryland On-Line). This is an excellent – the definitive – resource, if wordy, to help understand the entire process and its application to many situations. No migration of records took place between MD and DE. The DE warrants and surveys made in 1776+ to “novate” the land to DE jurisdiction reference the MD property descriptions, but as to the process by which that was done, I’m clueless. All such MD records remain in MSA holdings, even though they have suffered at the hands of Land Office and later archival indexing practices of various kinds. They are disorganized and difficult to access systematically. Publication of my work: a more complicated topic than I can treat here. Ideal publication is in digital form with a graphical viewer, enabling the user to see, manipulate, access and interrogate as I do. Making this happen is the problem. God knows I've tried ... several times. John