A fairly good people-finder for those ancestors whom you suspect may have been in Virginia ca 1787 (or who had family still living there that year), I have found the so-called 1787 Census of Virginia compiled some years ago by Netti Schreiner-Yantis and Florine S. Love to be of great help. Especially if your people were moving West (and not necessarily South to the Carolinas). At least with the help of this research, possibly negative, you may be able to rule out Virginia and Kentucky as the original home if they were alive during the period around 1787. These are personal property tax lists for all the counties that Virginia claimed in that period--including KY. The third volume of this set is the index, and perhaps every instance of your surname should be checked--because, if as in the case of my ancestor on the move to KY--he held property not only in Madison Co., KY where he and his mostly large family settled, but he also held property in his home county of Albemarle Co., VA. The 1790 censuses are sometimes faulty because those which are exist are mostly composed of reconstructed censuses based on tax lists. Why not go to the tax lists which existed about that time--if they exist? If you can find copies of what are called Colonial Papers of North Carolina and another set called State Papers of North Carolina, you may find your ancestor listed in those rather detailed indexes. Theses are BIG books and not held in most public libraries, but many University libraries have these sets in their local history sections. These ancestors on the move are a real challenge to the genealogist. But they are there somewhere--maybe only in the tax lists or the court records where they exist. E.W.Wallace