I've noticed over the many years I've been reading up on this region's history that a surprising number of settlers living in Cumberland in the mid 1700s moved south, especially into the northeastern corner of Bladen County, now Robeson. At that time the area was almost totally wild. In the late 1740s Cumberland was gaining steadily in population, but very few immigrant people lived south of Cumberland in this wet and swampy area, full of virgin forests and opportunity. Land speculators, however, had begun to obtain large tracts of it by the end of the 1740s. The Lumbee tribe had been living in this northeastern corner of Bladen for probably hundreds of years but they had not claimed all the lands surrounding their traditional homeland. There is an existing tax list from early Bladen County and a transcription of it is online at http://pages.prodigy.net/donnace7/1763tax.htm Make sure you click on page two at bottom. I suggest that those of you researching your earliest ancestors of this entire region (old Bladen/Robeson and Cumberland Counties) compare this list with the 1755 Cumberland County tax list to see if your ancestor moved southward as mine did. Steve E.