If you have kin in Virginia's Northern Neck, check here. This item came
from Dick Eastman's current column.
Carmen Finley
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- 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