Sully, Can you send me an email address for Rutherford County? Sure would appreciate it. thanks donaldandbecky@netzero.com ----- Original Message ----- From: <sully1@carolina.rr.com> To: <nclincol@rootsweb.com> Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 10:03 PM Subject: Re: [NCLINCOL] NCLINCOL Digest, Vol 2, Issue 150 > 31 October 2007, Jack Darr <Jedarr@aol.com > wrote: >> >> [Snipped] >> >> I am interesting in discovering exactly where my immigrant ancestors >> settled in the 1770s - not what county, but what section of what stream. >> The deeds and wills I have examined are not easy to interpret because >> they use stream names not currently used and they refer to neighboring >> properties by the names of then-current owners. > > We all grapple with the puzzles that Jack Darr describes. There is no > one answer but a couple of resources are helpful. > > The following resource lists North Carolina streams and other > geographical locations including those that are no longer used: > William S. Powell, /The North Carolina Gazetteer: A Dictionary of Tar > Heel Places/ (Chapel Hill: the University of North Carolina Press, > 1968). This is a valuable resource that is still in print and available > for a reasonable price. > > Deeds, wills, and other documents often refer to neighboring properties > by the names of folks who were neighbors when the land entry was > originally claimed. This could be (and usually was) many year earlier. > Even though the neighboring property owners changed over the years, the > person deeding or bequeathing the land naturally uses the description in > his original title. Why? Because surveys cost money and many people > don't want to incur the expense of a new survey. Thus, the land is > described according to the original title and not by who is a current > neighbor. The first thing to do is track the land back to when your > ancestor acquired it. At each step collect the land description and the > names of neighbors. Sometimes this goes as far back to a land patent as > early as the 1760s. This is one of the research steps that reveals where > an ancestor lived. Fortunately, Lincoln County researchers have many > records abstracted or transcribed and indexed, such as Margaret > Hofmann's abstracts of North Carolina land patents, Bruce Pruitt's > abstracts of Lincoln County deeds, and my transcriptions of Lincoln > County Court minutes. > > Kathy Gunter sullivan > > > > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > NCLINCOL-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the > quotes in the subject and the body of the message > >