If you have kin in Virginia's Northern Neck, check here. This item came from Dick Eastman's current column. Carmen Finley - --------------------------------------- - Virginia Grants Online Database Steve Knoblock has obviously been toiling on a labor of love. He has created an online database listing land grant records as originally abstracted in Northern Neck Grant Books. The database is available free of charge on the Web. The original hand-written Northern Neck Grant Books fill 37 volumes. These records were abstracted some years ago and published by the Fairfax County government in a single volume called "Beginning at a white Oak. Patents and Northern Neck Grants of Fairfax County, Virginia." The book is now out of print, and there are no plans to republish it. Steve Knoblock has been manually entering each abstract into a spreadsheet on his computer; the index fields from this spreadsheet are now available on Steve's Web site. The database is searchable by name, surname, grant date, grant book and issuer. I decided to try this for myself. I first searched for my own surname but didn't find any listings. I guess the family never made it to that part of Virginia. I then tried some more common surnames and found lots of results. Here is one such listing: Clark, Richard, . 94 11 Sep 1779 I:366, {Proprietary} With this information I can look at the original grant books, either in person or on a rented microfilm copy. I should be able to quickly find the full record as recorded by the clerks in 1779. The data usually found in the books would include the name, surname, tract size, date of grant, grant book, grant issuer and the surveyor's description. The home site for the search is at: http://whiteoak.home.att.net/index.html. Grant Books and the search are available at: http://whiteoak.home.att.net/landgrant/nn_grant_books.html while direct access to the database is at: http://www.city-gallery.com/whiteoak/landgrant.cgi