Doug, When I said that we shouldn't expect to find too many documents on our Sasser family dated before the 1800's; and especially anything particulary saying they had moved from Maryland to North Carolina, I wasn't thinking of "private papers" but rather public documents. When I first visited the North Carolina State Archives back in the 1960's, the State Archivist tried to explain to me why there weren't more public records surviving from the Colonial period. She told me that for many years, there was no permanent capitol. Court officials traveled from district to district and all the public records traveled along, packed into two-wheeled carts. These records, which we think of today as so prescious, were open to the elements. Many were lost off the carts. Many other records were lost over the years in courthouse fires and other disasters. Over the years, I have been frustrated by the so-called "burned" courthouses than by any other problems. Even floods. Just three or four years ago, the courthouse in Elba, Alabama was flooded and the public records there were devasted. Baker County, Georgia has lost their records in several floods. This "mother county" lost all their records prior to 1871 and several times since then. And this is just part of the problem: you will find that many public records were simply discarded. Talk to state archivists today and you will find a growing trend to microfilm records or put the information on computers and then simply throw away the original documents. In the 1970's, the National Archives Center in Atlanta microfilmed the 19 million Selective Service registration cards for all the men who had registered for the draf during World War I. ALL the original cards were stored at the Atlanta center for the entire nation. They took up a lot of room. The folks there didn't consider them to be of much value and wanted to get rid of them so they could use the extra room for storing income tax returns. At the time, I seemed to be one of the very few folks who even knew about these cards, much less used them frequently. I considered them to be of profound historical importance: here were registration cards that gave a man's complete name, date and place of birth, next of kin, occupation, residence and physical descriptions among other things. Registration was from 1917 to 1919: that meant that men born in the early 1870's were included. Where else could you find so many men's exact birth dates? The 1870's and 1880's was long before birth certificates came into general use and men born then could often go through their entire lives without ever recording their birthdate anywhere else. When I learned that the National Archives planned to destroy these records, I raised a major ruckus. I sent out letters and newsletters and made many phone calls to get this stopped. I began going through roll after roll of the microfilm that had been made. It was contracted out to a private company. I found entire rolls which had been over-exposed and all you could see was a washed-out white background, while others were almost totally black. I found dozens of rolls that were completely useless. This helped me convince the Director (who had become a friend after my many visits) not to destroy these registration cards. I convinced him that the public would certainly want to use these if they only knew about them. They then put up a display in their new visitor's center and had the original draft registration cards for Al Capone and Jack Benny (the famous movie and TV star--using his real name) and many other famous persons. Not until I found my Granddaddy's registration card did I know that he was red-haired. I had always known him as an older, gray-haired man and it was a real shock to learn he had once been red-headed! I state all this to try and explain that even today, we are still loosing PUBLIC records. If this is being done today, imagine how many records were lost in Colonial times and later in the 1800's simply because one person may not have considered then important enough to keep around. A good example of this is tax lists. Why keep an old tax list around after the taxes have been paid? It just takes up room and serves no purpose. In a lot of instances, tax lists are the ONLY kind of document left which mention a person from that period. And there are very, very few tax lists surviving today for the Colonial period in all the Southern states. As for deeds telling anything about migration movements, this is also extremely rare. Most deeds from this period don't even give precise measurements of the land, much less anything personal about the folks involved. I have gone over EVERY deed existing today for many of the counties in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia and finding any kind of personal information in deeds is like finding a gold mine. They are so rare, you can't help but let out a whoop! As more than one state archivist has explained to me, these are just SOME of the reasons why we can't expect to find many records from the Colonial period and the early 1800's. Robert Earl Woodham ------------------------------