Neil, There are two important outside factors to consider for the decreasing land ownership in SW PA in the late eighteenth century. The first is that, up until Anthony Wayne's defeat of the Indians at Fallen Timbers in August 1794, that particular stretch of the frontier was subject to frequent Indian attacks. These things tended to come in waves, with a high number of attacks in some years and none in others. For example, there were especially heavy attacks in 1763 (Pontiac Rebellion), during the American Revolution (British-sponsored), and after 1790 and 1791 (Harmar's and St. Clair's defeats), just to name a couple off the top of my head. The upshot of these attacks was that people often simply abandoned their land claims and moved back over the Allegheny Mountains to the east. The second factor is how land distribution was handled at the close of the American Revolution in 1783. I'll warn you in advance that after years of looking at this I still don't have a complete grasp of the system, but essentially land north and west of the Allegheny and Ohio Rivers in western PA was given to veterans in lieu of cash for their service in the Revolution. These were called Donation Lands. Then there were the Depreciation Lands, which were also given to veterans, except that they were issued because the Continental script that the soldiers had originally been paid with was nearly valueless - "depreciated." Without getting into the confusing details, the bottom line is that hundreds of thousands of acres went to soldiers from the Revolution, many of whom had no intention whatsoever of claiming them. As a result, land speculators, such as the famous Revolutionary War financier Robert Morris (founder of the first National Bank), bought up huge tracts of Donation and Depreciation Land certificates. For example, John Nicholson, the state's comptroller general, owned 3.7 million acres in western and northern Pennsylvania by 1787. These speculators mostly lived in the east around Philadelphia and New York and so became absentee landowners. Our Scotch-Irish ancestors, along with some Germans and a few immigrants of various and sundry other nationalities, took this absenteeism as an open invitation to settle perfectly good land that, as far as they were concerned, was just lying there for the taking. Interestingly (and again, I can't quote all of the details off the top of my head), the courts eventually recognized - at least in some cases - the claims of these squatters and their plow and blood equity in the land over those of the land speculators. It was, after all, it was the settlers farming the land and giving up their scalps to the Indians, not the rich guys in Philadelphia. This action would cover the period that you seem to be most interested in, roughly the late 1780s and the 1790s. I would suggest that Donation/Depreciation Land transfers were a large factor in the apparent decrease in landownership that you note below. Ownership on paper was being centralized elsewhere, but our ancestors were doing the plowing and the birthing, and the living and the dying. BTW, the irony is that many of the land speculators lost everything, while many of our ancestors thrived (again, due largely to the position taken by the courts). Robert Morris, once one of the richest men in America, died penniless due to his losses in land speculation. Rob -----Original Message----- From: macbd1 [mailto:macbd1@arthur.k12.il.us] Sent: Friday, December 09, 2005 6:39 PM To: Scotch-Irish-L@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: [Sc-Ir] Re: Land ownership; indentured servant; ports of emigration; Early Scotch-Irish arrivals Ok Linda, thanks for the clarification, where the original statement seemed to mislead researchers (to me.) Even so, I don't understand how 'they' (source?) could have calculated the 90% chance of finding land ownership records sometime during the lifetime of any given ancestor. This still seems very high to me, in light of the work by Harper and others. In sw PA, for example, the % of landowning tax payers was 'decreasing' during the 1780-1800 period. By 1796 the landowning yeoman farmer group was near 30% of taxable population (but who owned 2/3 of the land) with the largest group being landless 'dependents,' at 43% of the population. These 'dependents' consisted of general laborers, farm laborers and tenant farmers with the remainder being the feeble, the poor and otherwise unemployables. With this arrangement of land ownership, or lack of it, being typical...well, someone else can do the math but it seems that 100% of this 'dependent' group would have had to purchase land previously or later, somewhere, in order for 90% of this total multi-county population to be classified as landowners by end of the population lifetime (highly unlikely to me.)