An important part of a families life before 1850 was owning land. 9 out of 10 adult males owned land. From 1600s on land records have always been very well maintained in America. Many times land deed records will list people not appearing on census data. Every county in the USA has a Grantor/Grantee Index or Index to Real-Estate Conveyances. Most other types index systems are not this comprehensive. So these are important! Even after courthouses burned down, as most seemed to, the first records reconstructed were usually land records. Owning land was very important to people.
It is important to understand, in land record research, the difference between a deed and a grant or patent. A grant is the transfer of a piece of property from some governmental organization to an individual. It is the first action that occurs and the first evidence found in researching land records. A land deed is the transfer of land from one person, or entity to another. It occurs after the original grant.
When doing your family history research what might you find in old land deeds?
At first you may look at a land record and only see names, but no important information like birth dates, death dates, marriage dates or children. This may discourage you from using land records in family history research. But evidence of where your ancestors lived, moved and whom they knew can be gleamed from deeds. It is said there is a 90% chance you can find an ancestral land record. Land records are solid proof of where your ancestor lived at a certain time, provided you have an idea of what county they may have lived in. Many times a wife’s name is mentioned on the land records due to her legal dower rights, which automatically gave her 1/3 of the land after her husband’s death. Her name had to be documented on the record for legal reasons. Land records go farther back in history than any other type of record, and so are more comprehensive. Deeds, deed indexes, hand written records and property tax records all are part of land record research. They are all related to the deed research. After 1900, a deed will even give you the exact address of a property!
The deed books containing records of property transfers by county can usually be found at the Registrar of Deeds office at the county courthouse. In several New England states such as Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont, they may be located at the town clerks office. In Louisiana, the Parish keeps records of deeds. In Alaska, they are at the district level. There are a variety of records that may be found in deed books. They are Deed of Sale, Deed of Gift, Strawman Sale, Lease & Release, Mortgage Sale and Estate Settlement. Take a little time to learn what these records are and your research will be vastly improved.
Here is an excellent book on Tennessee Land Records.
Earliest Tennessee Land Records and Earliest Tennessee Land History
The publishers describe it as such:
Once in a generation, someone compiles a genealogy reference work that instantly becomes a standard in its field because it aggregates a vital collection of records in one place, explains how those records originally came to be, and, in the process, promises to save its users hours of toil. Earliest Tennessee Land Records and Earliest Tennessee Land History, by Irene Griffey, is such a book.
The State of Tennessee was established, essentially, from land ceded to the federal government by North Carolina. Clouding the various land cession laws that transferred the title of land from North Carolina to the United States south of the River Ohio (a territory) and then to Tennessee was the requirement, however vaguely defined, that North Carolina Revolutionary soldiers’ promise of land for military service be honored. Among other things, this requirement resulted in the inclusion of hundreds of footnotes to the Tennessee land laws that spelled out the land transfer process. In the first portion of this book, Mrs. Griffey has done an extraordinary job of sifting through and organizing the legal history of the early Tennessee land laws so that genealogists may be able to grasp their substance. Among other things, researchers can now understand when and why the various county land offices were established, the six-step process for obtaining a land grant, the differences between military and other types of land grants, and, of course, how to use early Tennessee land records.
The bulk of this remarkable volume, however, consists of abstracts of some 16,000 of the earliest Tennessee land records in existence, arranged in a tabular format. For each record we are given the name of the claimant, the file number, the name of the assignee (if any), the county, number of acres, grant number, date, entry number, entry date, land book and page number, and a description of the stream nearest to the grant. A separate listing of assignees, with the corresponding claimant and file numbers follows in a separate table. The volume concludes with a lengthy appendix consisting of maps and a detailed chronology of Tennessee’s land statutes. All of which makes Mrs. Griffey’s new book the most important contribution to Tennessee genealogy in recent memory.
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