Libby Baker Wrote: I'm going back and refining some of my earlier research concerning the children of John James and Dinah Allen and just where they were born. The parents were born in Stafford County, no question. Many researchers say Fauquier County was the birthplace of their children from about 1742 to 1756. However, Fauquier wasn't formed till 1759, and then it was from Prince William County, not Stafford. Would anyone know when John and Dinah moved out of Stafford county? They lived at Elk Run, clearly in Fauquier, so why are the children said to be born in Stafford instead of Prince William Co.? Hope someone can straighten me out here. Libby Baker Well, Libby, I am hardly the person to *straighten you out*. What you have come up against are some of Virginia's *burned counties*--a fate which many of us suffer in trying to collect info on our colonial and pre-Civil War ancestors. Stafford Co. is a *burned county* according to some books I recently ordered from Iberian Publishing now known as New Papyrus Publishing in Athens GA. That is why we genealogists have to help one another. Sometimes a *cousin* or just a curious genealogist will know of a Bible record, a manuscript, some *vertical files* which may help unravel a family mystery [or at least a mystery to the current researcher]. Old letters, with some unusual names, and also an 1820s bail bond found by a distant cousin have helped me jump some hurdles. Prince William Co. also has some missing records. A good many of us use land records, when they are still extant, to unravel these family ties. Nearly every land record, including the grants on the Library of Virginia website, for State land states [the original 13 colonies, those States formed from those 13 colonies, Texas, Hawaii and a few others] refers to a watercourse--a creek, a run, a river, a swamp, etc. That is why a lot of people use such programs as deed-mapper, although others use less technical methods, etc. They use tools like protractors, etc. If you can find the watercourses on which your people live, collect every family who lives on or near that watercourse, and then try to make an educated guess [I call them deductions, depending on how solid the evidence is] as to what family the second wife may have belonged to. One noted genealogist-lecturer-librarian makes the claim that nearly all colonial Virginian men married a girl downstream. An exaggeration, of course, but .... try to imagine the transportation--no paved roads, no street lights, had to get up to work at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning. How far would a person go for a mate? My experience with a lot widows and widowers is that they frequently did not wait long after the death of the previous wife or husband to remarry, especially if there were small children to be cared for. Widows, for the most part, were not educated enough to be able to handle the business affairs of a farm, and the widowers could not cope with caring for small children!!! (My sociology course, many decades ago, called Marriage and the Family, did not prepare me for these findings!! My aunt clued me in on some aspects of a mother's death. If the child had to be nursed to survive, a wet nurse had to be found. My aunt thought her half-brother, whose mother had died about three days after his birth, had been nursed by an aunt who had a child born about the same time.) Land records, occcasionally, especially if the deed books record deeds of gift [frequently daughters were given slaves by their parent] and/or powers of attorney, or deeds of distribution may be helpful--I have found that so. The latter deeds of distribution after the death of the landowner are called different names in different states. I cannot say what they were called in the deed indexes of Virginia. In Kentucky, about the 1850s, they seemed to be called commissioners deeds. In Louisana, they were called *family meetings* or some such title. Occasionally, one will get lucky and find a well-prepared probate index, such as I have encountered in some North Carolina counties. There will be a devisor index and the devisees in the next column. Here I have picked up the married names of daughters. What I am telling you is this--there may not be an easy answer to your problem. And you may have to look in ALL the surrounding Virginia counties for records for your folks. And go to as many lectures and conferences as you can to learn how the professionals solve these problems--and some never do!!! Do you subscribe to the FREE newsletter of Ancestry.com? There are generally articles by professionals who tell you some of the methods they use--or try to use--to tear down some of their brick walls!! The archives of this newsletter when it was daily are filled with techniques to overcome brickwalls. Try this URL ance[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) (Remove any punctuation which may be added by rootsweb. Go down the very bottom of the first screen and there are some links to subscribe. Also the whole webpage has some wonderful links.) Good luck to you, E.W.Wallace who is also stuck on some Stafford and Prince William Co. colonial ancestors' lives **************************************Check out AOL's list of 2007's hottest products. (http://money.aol.com/special/hot-products-2007?NCID=aoltop00030000000001)