Thank you Kathy! Interesting references and as you say, they are affordable. Do you or does anyone know of any maps where one can plot the deeds? Are the original deeds, or have the original deeds been placed on maps? Gues that is a somewhat stupid question because I have seen some maps like that, but are those just because a specific researcher did that or are such maps in sany State records? If one could do that, one could follow the property, through time as state and county boundaries changed. Thank you and thank you for your work on recording court minutes. Linda Peacock -----Oprindelig meddelelse----- Fra: nclincol-bounces@rootsweb.com [mailto:nclincol-bounces@rootsweb.com] På vegne af sully1@carolina.rr.com Sendt: 1. november 2007 03:04 Til: nclincol@rootsweb.com Emne: 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