Today we are going to look at land records and see if they can tell us anything new about the Silas Blackshear family.
I love getting my hands on deeds, because they usually tell you exactly where a person lived (assuming you can unravel the description), can give you hints as to when a person arrived or moved away from a specific town, and will often give an indication of how wealthy (or not) a person was. I'm going to lump the tax records in here also, since they can tell us if a person owned land (and, if so, how much), approximately where a person lived (sometimes, actually, down to the lot number if in a town), as well as in which years they were living or owning property there. We are also going to be looking at some maps, because, hey, I love maps! (They can give us a lot of information as well as being just fun!)
Before we get into the actual documents, though, I want to review what we have learned about the family so far. When I did my posts on W. C. Cheatham, I waited until the very end to pull things together, and then I had to go back and read through all nineteen posts to pull out all the information that I couldn't keep track of in my head. Since I will be making a family data sheet and timeline for Silas Blackshear as well, I figured I'd try doing it as we go along.
Sources
1. 1830 census
2. 1840 census
3. 1850 census
4. 1860 census
5. Extrapolation based on ages and locations given in census
6. Extrapolation based on formation of counties in Georgia
7. Scarborough family record
8. Marriage records
(And once again, for some reason when I copied the table above out of a word document it did the funny thing with the lines. So we'll just have to try our best to ignore that, yeah?)
I added the sources over on the right-hand side, because I think it is helpful to document where the information came from (you know, so you don't have to say
what was I thinking?!) I didn't do this on W. C. Cheatham's timeline - I just listed all the sources at the bottom - but I'm going to go back and do a revised timeline like this one that I'll eventually put up on his page as well.
So, that's what we have for the family so far. I put the circa mark in front of most of the dates because, based on the sources we've looked at, some of them could be a year earlier or later.
Okay. Land records. As it turns out, looking for Blackshear land records was a frustrating endeavor. You get lucky researching a particular person or place, and you expect to easily find all kinds of stuff for your next line of research. Instead, you find every family member except the one you want, you discover that a county courthouse and all its records burned down, you learn that counties were divided into other counties, which were divided into other counties, and to top it off, half the records you want to look at are not available online, and the ones that are have random deed books missing from the collections. So I think we are going to narrow things down today, but still be left without a lot (if any) definitive answers.
I want to start at the top of the timeline, which would be Silas Blackshear's birth. Silas reported on the census that he was born in Georgia and he was living in Houston County in 1830. I think most people are saying he was born is Houston County then, because that is the earliest record we have for him. (Well, that and the fact that the
Blacksheariana printed that information!) But if you remember, Houston County wasn't created until 1821. I chose Twiggs County as his
maybe birth place, then, because - well, to tell you the truth, I saw that a few people had put that on their Blackshear trees. Since Twiggs was on the frontier at the time, and Houston County would be formed adjoining it, that seems to make sense. Of course, at this point we have no actual proof that this is true. He could have very well been born in some other county that existed during his birth year.
So I said to myself,
well, maybe I can find some sort of land document showing where they lived between 1811 and 1814, which is the range of years we get from the different ages on three of the census records. I decided to start with Twiggs County. Do we have any proof that Silas' family ever actually lived there?
Well,
Ancestry has a collection of Georgia Tax Digests, and they have the Twiggs County ones for the years 1818, 1826, 1830, 1833, and 1853. I looked through the first four (since the family was in Texas by 1853), and found Silas' father, Jacob, only in the year 1818:
You will see a Randal Blackshear five lines down from the top. This is one of Jacob Blackshear's nephews. Jacob is four lines up from the bottom. (Incidentally, Jacob's brother, son, and three nephews were all found in the 1818 tax rolls for Twiggs County.) So we know that the family
was in Twiggs County when Silas was a child, but we don't know how early they arrived, since this is the earliest tax record available. I would have loved to look through deed records for Twiggs, but since their courthouse burned down in 1901, all that is left of the early deeds is a few random abstracts.
However, Twiggs County was created in 1809 from Wilkinson County. (Wilkinson had been created in 1803 from Creek lands.) If they were already in Georgia prior to 1809 and lived on land that would later become Twiggs County, there should be some kind of record from Wilkinson County, right?
Now, here is a little history lesson:
Prior to 1803, vacant lands in Georgia were given out through headright grants. Basically, that means that (originally) the governor, and later a land court, could give land to anyone that was found deserving. They needed to do this because they had a lot of trouble getting anyone to want to come to Georgia! Anyway, when it was in the hands of the governor, it became quite a corrupt practice, hence the establishment of the land courts. In 1803, new lands were acquired from the Creek Indians, and the Land Lottery Act was passed. The first two land lotteries were in 1805 and 1807, and gave out lands in what became Wilkinson and Baldwin Counties (see
interactive map). Each time more lands were ceded to Georgia, another lottery was held.
According to the
University System of Georgia - Georgia Archives:
Land Lottery Records
Eight times between 1805 and 1833 Georgia held lotteries to distribute land, the largest held in the United States. The lotteries followed a simple pattern: The General Assembly passed an act that authorized the lottery and spelled out who would be eligible to participate and the grant fees that would apply.
- The land to be distributed was surveyed and laid out in districts and lots. The surveyors sent the district and lot numbers to the governor’s office.
- Eligible citizens registered their names in their county of residence. The names were sent to the governor’s office at the state capital. Beginning with the second lottery the names were copied onto slips of paper called “tickets” and placed in a large drum called a “wheel.”
- District and lot numbers were placed in a separate wheel. (At first, blank tickets were added to this wheel, so that the number of tickets would equal the number of persons drawing.)
- Commissioners appointed by the governor drew a name ticket from one wheel and a district/lot ticket from the other wheel. If the district/lot ticket was blank, the person received nothing. If the ticket contained a district/lot number, the person received a prize of that parcel of land. A ticket that contained a number was called a “Fortunate Draw.” With later lotteries (after 1820), when blank tickets were not added to the prize wheel, individuals whose names remained in the second wheel were considered to have drawn blanks.
- Anyone who received a Fortunate Draw could take out a grant for the lot he drew, after paying the grant fee. If he did not take out a grant, the lot reverted back to the state to be sold to the highest bidder.
So, who was entitled to enter the drawing in the first lottery?
Person Entitled to Draw
- Bachelor, 21 years or over, 1 year residence in Georgia, citizen of United States – 1 draw
- Married man with wife and/or child, 1 year residence in Georgia, citizen of United States – 2 draws
- Widow with child under 21 years, 1 year residence in Georgia – 2 draws
- Orphan or family of orphans under 21 years, with father dead and mother dead or remarried – 1 draw
I didn't find anything for Jacob in the first two lotteries, but I did discover that two of his brothers, a first cousin, and two other relatives all lived in Washington County, Georgia and registered for the land lottery of 1805 - which means that they were already in Georgia by 1804 at the latest. Of course, that isn't proof that Jacob was also there, but the last record we find of him in North Carolina is for the 1801 sale of land that he had inherited from his grandmother, so it makes sense that he would have moved at the same time as his other relatives.
One of Jacob's relatives was a fortunate drawer in the first lottery. (I found this
transcription of results online - I think this is probably a brother.)
I also looked through the indexes on the
FamilySearch website and was able to find a land grant for Jacob's brother Moses from the 1807 (second) lottery. It is for land in Wilkinson County, and is dated 1811 (sometimes it took awhile for the fortunate drawers to actually get the deed to their land). Now here is the interesting thing: the grant shows that Moses got 202 1/2 acres, comprising lot 2 of district 28 in Wilkinson County. This portion would later be sectioned off as a part of the new Twiggs County in 1809. If we look back at the Twiggs County tax records for 1818, we see that all of those Blackshear families were living in either district 27 or 28. Take a look at this map:
The blue shows the original boundaries of Wilkinson County. The yellow shows the portion that later became Twiggs. The red shows district 27 (where Jacob's two nephews lived), and the green shows district 28 (where his brother and son lived). The little red circle in the corner of the green section shows the land of Moses Blackshear.
So, what does any of this have to do with Jacob, or for that matter, Silas, which is who we are really supposed to be talking about here?
Take a look at the top portion of the 1818 Twiggs County Tax Digest:
The headings are:
Name, Land (1, 2, 3, P), d., (something illegible), County, Waters & Bounds, (something that could be an
S or an
f, depending on which page you look at),
$, and
cents (I think!).
Now look at what was recorded for Jacob:
Nothing is recorded except the tax amount. That means that, although he was living in Twiggs County, he did not own any land anywhere in Georgia in 1818. (Taxes were paid in the county in which one lived, regardless of where their land was.)
I originally thought that maybe Jacob had purchased land at some point after the lottery and I just couldn't find the deed (you should see the indexes in those deed books!). But once I discovered that he didn't actually own land there, I had a new thought. What if he and his family were living on his brother's land? We don't know if he was in district 27 or 28 - most of the people in Captain Jefferson's district lived in one or the other.
And speaking of tax districts, you can completely ignore the fact that it says "Captain Jefferson's District" - that just means that a Mr. Jefferson was the captain of the militia for that area in that year. The tax rolls were based on the militia rosters, so every time a new militia captain was elected, there would be a new name on the tax rolls! (Eventually somebody realized that this was a ridiculous system and gave all of the tax/militia districts a number. The districts we are talking about now, though, are the original land survey districts.)
Anyway, Jacob's brother Moses did have 202
1/2 acres. Since an average family with several sons could only work 40 to 80 acres back then, both families living on the same land would be a plausible scenario. (Of course, Moses could have had slaves, but I don't have any evidence one way or another about that, and even if he did have a few, that doesn't mean his land still wouldn't support his brother's family as well.)
I came across another possible scenario yesterday. In their paper, "Land Openings on the Georgia Frontier...", Bleakley and Ferrie explain that
Decades
after the land opening, it may have been more difficult to locate a lot's
owner....Using the state-disseminated lists to find a winner who wanted to sell
might be easy in the lottery's immediate aftermath, but those lists would
become dated rather quickly in a period of high westward migration.
Nevertheless, the low cost to claim land winnings motivated most lottery
winners to take formal possession of their lot. But even owners who developed
their lot may have become impossible to find if they subsequently abandoned
their land. Roger Ransom (2005) dubbed
this period the era of "walk away farming," in which it was
commonplace for farmers to simply leave their land in response to bad shocks.
Obviously you cannot negotiate with a neighbor that you cannot find, and such
`walk away' neighbors would retain de jure ownership of their lot for some
time. A farmer who wanted to expand onto this abandoned land could do so with
some hope of eventually acquiring title, but this was not without risk.
(Wow. I feel like I just wrote a paper for college!) So I suppose it is possible that Jacob's family was living on land that for whatever reason was unoccupied (which is to say, squatting).
Anyway . . . after all that, I would say that Jacob Blackshear could have been living in Wilkinson County prior to 1809, and even if he arrived in Georgia later - like maybe after his father's death (between 1808 and 1810) - was probably living near his brother Moses in Twiggs County before 1811, which means that I'm pretty confident that Silas Blackshear was born in Twiggs County!
Regardless of when they arrived, we know for a fact that the family was in Twiggs County in 1818, but we don't know how long they stayed, since there is a gap in the tax lists until 1826, at which point we no longer find them there. By 1830, they were living in Houston County (marked in purple on the map above).
I looked in an index of deeds for Houston County for the years 1823-1943 on
FamilySearch, thinking maybe I could find a land deed showing when they arrived. The index was obviously copied from all of the original deed indexes, because it had thousands of names, was only vaguely alphabetical, and jumped around all over the place with the years (very few of which were in the first two decades after the county was formed). Houston County deed books
E, F, G, H, and
I were also available online, and I checked all of those indexes as well, but none of my searching turned up a Jacob Blackshear. (Volumes A-D have no indexes, so that is like more than a thousand deeds I would have to look through, which I have not had time to do yet.)
Those were the only Houston County land records available online, so I just did a general internet search for Blackshear land records and managed to find this transcription of fortunate drawers in the 1821 land lottery:
And later down the list:
This shows Jacob's son Enoch, living in Twiggs County in 1821, drawing land in both Houston and Monroe Counties. (I haven't come across any evidence that either Jacob or Enoch ever lived in Monroe County, so I only marked the Houston County lot on the map above.)
While I was at the Family History Center I checked the Houston County 1821 land lottery grants. Those records showed that Enoch's land was finally granted in 1829. (They sure had to wait a long time to get title to their land, didn't they?) This grant gave him title, so there wouldn't be an original deed in the county deed books showing him purchasing the land. The lot was 202 1/2 acres.
Why might this be relevant? Well, the
Blacksheariana references a 1903 work that says Jacob did not appear on the Twiggs County tax list for 1826 and that he had probably gone on to Houston County to hold the land for his son until he was granted title. Apparently this was a common thing to do during that time. It would make sense, especially because Jacob didn't seem to have owned any of his own land. (Wait. I just noticed from my notes that Enoch doesn't appear in the Twiggs County tax lists in 1826 or 1830 either, so maybe they went on to the new land together.)
We know for certain that Jacob was living in Houston County in 1830 (both he and Enoch appear in Houston County on the 1830 census, but since they are listed two pages apart, were probably not living on the same piece of land by then), and now we see that it is
possible that they actually began living there as early as 1821 (the year of the land lottery), and - dare we say
likely? - that they were in Houston County by 1826.
So. Houston County. Tax lists are available online for the years 1829, 1831, 1835, 1837, 1839, 1846, and a few later years. Since 1829 is the earliest, there is no way to test our theories about when they may have arrived there. I found Jacob only on the 1829 tax list:
We can see Jacob eleven names down. The headings this time are
Pine Lands, Oak & Hickory, Quality, County, District, Numbers, Stock in Trade, Town Lots & Value, Gigs & Carriages, Stallions, Poles, Slaves, Dollars, and Cents.
This makes it look like Jacob owned 202 1/2 acres of pine lands in Lee County. But if you go back to the previous pages, you can see that the tick marks don't always make sense as meaning "same as above." Most of the time they make more sense as meaning "none." On top of that, he only owed 62 1/2 cents for his taxes, which is the same amount as everyone else with a whole row of tick marks. The people who actually had land or gigs or slaves owed more than that.
Take a look at the very top of the page where it tells the tax/militia district. It says that this is a list of defaulters. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that he didn't pay his taxes. According to the
Georgia Archives website,
A list of persons owing taxes was often included at the end of the tax digests. These lists were usually published in a local newspaper, as well. Sometimes the lists were published before the tax deadline, and are really lists of persons who had not yet filed their returns, as opposed to actual defaulters. There were several ways a person could be listed as a defaulter:
1. The taxpayer had moved out of the geographical area of the militia (tax) district.
2. The person reported as a defaulter was under age. The captain’s tax list was often formulated from lists of men registered for militia duty. Such lists included the age group 16-20, which was not subject to taxation.
3. The person actually defaulted (failed to pay their taxes).
4. The person was absent from the area.
5. The person was listed as a taxpayer and a defaulter in the same district. This situation may have resulted from non-standardized spelling.
I don't think he had moved away, because he would be on the census in Houston County the very next year. He wasn't under age. He wasn't listed twice. That means he either didn't pay, or had yet to pay, his taxes, or he was absent from the area. Remember, he wasn't in the 1831 or later tax lists from Houston County, so maybe he was off for a bit scoping out the place they would move to by the end of the following year. Enoch appeared in 1831 and 1835, and then he sold two 202 1/2 adjoining land lots in 1836 (one of which he obtained from the 1821 land lottery, and the other was listed in the 1830 tax digest as belonging to his brother John! I have a copy of the deed - if anyone wants it, let me know.) And that is the last record for him in Houston County as well.
By 1840, Jacob was living in his son Silas' household in Stewart County. So where was he in the decade before that? And where was Silas between the year when he got married (1833 or 1834) and 1840? Maybe they headed off to Stewart County right after the 1830 census was taken.
Stewart County is way over on the western border of Georgia, outlined in orange on my map. (Here is a
map link if you want to look at it again, but don't want to lose your place while reading!) Created in 1826, it was originally a part of Lee County. Districts 1-13 of Lee were given out in the 1827 lottery. (I couldn't find anything online telling when districts 17-22 were given out.) Of course I looked through the indexes of the land lottery grants for Lee County. I didn't find any Blackshears at all, so maybe Jacob purchased some land there from a lottery winner. The other land lottery grants I looked at show that it took about six to eight years before a fortunate drawer actually received title to their land. In the case of Lee County, that would put it at about 1833. That is only a couple of years later than Jacob disappeared from the Houston County tax rolls, making it a plausible scenario if the land had been one of the first lots given title or if they had sped up the process by then.
So, did I look in the Stewart County deed records to check my idea? You know I did! They were a bit of a mess, though (I'll bet you aren't surprised). There was a file labeled Books
A & B that had indexes for
A and
B, but also seemed to have deeds from books C without an index. There were also files with books
D&E, F&H, J&K, L&P, Q&R, and
S&T. Those all had indexes, which I checked. Books
G,
I, L, M, N, & O were nowhere to be found. I never did find a record of Jacob or Silas purchasing any land in Stewart County, but I suppose the deed may have been in one of those missing books (one-third of them were missing, so it wouldn't be surprising). I found deeds all over the place (both buying and selling land) for Silas' brother John, though. Maybe he was the reason they moved out there in the first place.
(Guess what? As if all of this wasn't complicated enough already, I discovered just now that the
Blacksheariana reports that John held nearly 400 acres of land in Houston County back in 1830, even though he himself was living in a different county. So maybe Jacob was living on
his land, instead of on Enoch's. I'll bet if I went back and found all of his deeds - which I most likely won't because that would take a
very long time - I would discover that he sold that land around the time Jacob quit living there.)
When I hit this point in my research I was feeling pretty good about what I'd managed to find. Although I still didn't have any definite answers, a possible picture was forming that looked like this:
Silas Blackshear
c. 1811-1814 born in Twiggs Co., GA
1818-1820 age 4-9, living in household of father in Twiggs, Co., GA (confirmed)
c. 1821-1826 age 10-15, living in household of father, Jacob. Moved to Houston Co., GA.
1829/1830 age 15 to 19, living in household of father in Houston Co., GA (confirmed)
c. 1831 age 17 to 20, living in household of father, Jacob. Moved to Stewart Co., GA
c. 1833-1834 age 19 to 23, marriage, living in Stewart Co., Georgia
1840/41 age 26 to 29, head of household, in Stewart Co., GA (confirmed)
And then . . . then I came across a record of the third land lottery, the one before the one for Houston County, held in 1820 and giving out land in a handful of counties that, as far as we know, none of our Blackshears were ever connected to.
The following list came from a website titled "1820 Twiggs Land Lottery." That makes absolutely no sense, so what it must really mean, is the list of Twiggs residents who were fortunate drawers in the 1820 lottery.
This is the top portion of the list, so you can see the column headings:
And later down the list:
Jacob Blackshear drew one lot in Irwin County (shown outlined in pink at the bottom of the map). I tried looking in the indexes on
FamilySearch for early deeds and mortgages in Irwin County and didn't find any Blackshears. But I did find a book on the
HathiTrust website, published in 1850 - something called
A Copy of the Original List of the Drawing of "Old Irwin County"... (The title actually has more than an additional 50 words!) by B. B. De Graffenried. It is a listing of everyone who drew lots, where they lived, the date they received the grant, as well as which lots never had the fee paid and reverted back to the state (shown in italics).
So there, number 96 on the list, we see Jacob Blackshear, living in Twiggs County, finally receiving land from the 1820 lottery in December of 1834 -
fourteen years after the drawing (?!?!). The interesting thing is, Jacob's name on this list is not in italics. That means his lands did not revert. That means he paid the $18 (equivalent to just under $400 today) fee and got 490 acres of land!
But, you might be asking, if Jacob Blackshear won land in Irwin County, why don't we ever see him living there? Well, according to
one website:
Most winners never saw the lots they won but sold out to speculators who in turn sold the lots to other families, many of whom had just arrived in Georgia. Consequently valuable genealogical information on the winners or their heirs can, at times, be found in the recorded deeds of the counties where the land lots existed, even when the winners lived elsewhere.
Hmmmm. Since I didn't find any deeds with Jacob Blackshear as a grantor in the Irwin County records, I decided maybe I should try to double check the information in this list to see if it was actually correct. I went down to a Family History Center so I could look at the list of 1820 land lottery grants that was locked on the
FamilySearch website. I found this index:
Then I went to page 148 and it wasn't the right deed! So I double checked the index. This index is much, much, much easier to read than most, so I knew I wasn't interpreting it wrong. So I went back through the deeds. For some reason, in the middle of the microfilm file, the page numbers just started all over again with page 1, and in that section, I found Jacob's land grant:
So yes, the information in the book was correct. I am assuming that, even though Jacob didn't receive title to the land until 1834, that doesn't mean he still lived in Twiggs County at that point. Because remember, we have proof that he was in Houston County in 1829 and 1830. So I guess whatever information was recorded at the time of the drawing is what was put on the land grant papers.
So maybe when he left Twiggs, Jacob actually went to check out his land in Irwin County, instead of to hold Enoch's land in Houston County. Or how about this - maybe he wanted to stay near his son, so he didn't want to live in Irwin County, so he never went there until later, after Enoch arrived to occupy the land in Houston, and then he went over to Irwin to check out his land in 1829, which is why he was listed as a defaulter on the tax list. Or maybe he went between the time that he lived in Houston and Stewart, and when he got there he had to tell whoever was living on his land in Irwin and had invested time building a house and clearing fields,
pay up or I will take all of this and they agreed so he paid the fee to get title and then sold the land and got the money that he and Silas used to buy the land in Stewart County that they were living on in 1840. (Whew! I guess anything's possible! All we
do know is that he wasn't living in Irwin between 1830 - 1832, because he doesn't show up in the tax lists.)
And while I'm talking about Jacob's land lottery successes, here is another bit of information to get you all confused: I just discovered that the
Blacksheariana reports that Jacob was a fortunate drawer in the 1832 lottery as well, which he entered as a resident of Sinclair's district in Houston County. I haven't found any confirmation of this, because for some reason the section from which he drew is not on any of the online lists, but maybe Perry Blackshear was privy to some documents that I haven't found, so I'm going to take his word for it. The problem is, Jacob did not appear in the Houston County tax digest for 1831. So why would we expect him to be there in 1832? Enoch was living in Sinclair's district in 1831, and I know I told you those names changed every year, but a popular captain would have been elected multiple years in a row. So, maybe Jacob was over in Irwin County in 1831, shaking down the guy who had settled on his previous land lottery lot! (So much for having figured out a possible timeline!)
But back to Stewart County - how do we know they actually
owned that land? Well, there is one tax digest available online for Stewart County, and it is for the year 1841:
Silas is the very first name on the page. (His initials are used, even though they weren't supposed to do that.) Remember, Silas was listed as a head of household and had both of his parents living with him on the 1840 census. The headings on this one are
Land, Number, District, Quality, Pine, Pole, Town Property, Stock & Trade, Money at Interest, Four Wheel Carriage, Lawyers, Dr. or M. C. (I think?)
, $, Cents, and
M.
Here is a close-up so you can read what was recorded for Silas:
He had 175 acres of land, lot number 57 in district 20. The quality of the land was 2 (out of 3), and it was in Stewart County. The land is not specified as being pine land. He was assessed one pole, which means he had no slaves. (Free men and slaves under the age of 60 were assessed a pole tax. Jacob would have been too old to be taxed at this point, so the fact that he is not on the list does not mean he had moved away or died.) Nothing else is marked, except for the tax amounts and the column "M," but I have absolutely no idea what that means. Oh, and that $979 at the top is what was carried over from the previous page totals, not what Silas actually owed in taxes!
The cool thing about this is that we now have enough of a description that we know almost exactly where the family lived. I hate to keep sending you back to look at the map, so I copied the relevant portion for you (yay!):
The front of the tax digest said that it was the book for the Lumpkin area. You can see that town on the map. Silas lived in district 20, which is the box outlined in the bottom center of the county. But we can do even better. He owned 175 acres within lot 57. So where was that exactly?
Here is a militia district map showing all of the lots in district 20:
I don't remember where I got this map, but it is basically a copy of the original Lee County survey map for District 20 (because Stewart was formed out of Lee, remember?). If you click on it (or the title) to get an enlarged view, you will see that lot 57 is near the center almost at the very bottom. (In case you notice that lots 1-32 are missing, that is because the bottom of the twentieth district was not included in the new Stewart County.)
And here is a close-up of lot 57 from the original Lee County survey map:
Stewart County
District 20, Lot 57
You'll see how the western side of the lot was covered in pine, and there is the branch of a river running through part of it. I don't know what the letters in the eastern corners stand for, but I do know they are all types of trees. (I looked through the actual
field survey book and it lists all the types of trees so the surveyor could put them on his map. The "B.g. might stand for "black gum," but I don't know what the "p" on the end would be.) The tax record says that Silas only held 175 out of the 202 1/2 acres in lot 57. The column for Pine was not checked, so either he didn't own the western portion, or most of the pine trees had been cut down in the fourteen years since this map was made.
I actually found the deed in which Silas sold this piece of land (I didn't find a deed for the purchase, so I don't think the lack of a deed of sale for the Irwin County land means much.) You'd think we could use that to tell exactly which part of lot 57 was his, right? Well. Check this out:
And here is a close-up of the section with the description of the land being sold:
I know this is hard to read. It doesn't really get much better when you enlarge it. So here is a transcription for you. If anyone else decides to give it a try and comes up with a different version, let me know!
...heirs and assigns all that tract or parcel of land situate lying and being in the (20th) twentieth District of originally Lee now Stewart Known and distinguished in the plan of said District By the number 57th) fifty seven containing one hundred sixty six and half acres more or less the south boundary to commence near the south east corner say at a shed (?) of Green Lewis formerly but now belonging to Gustavus DeSannag run a western course and strike an oak stump right where the road leaves the fence and direct from that point to the southwest corner of said lot with all the rights members and appurtenances ....
Seriously? That's the legal description of his land? I mean, I know that it was originally surveyed using the (primitive) ball and chain method (hence the scale "40 chains to an inch" on the
original map), but still. That was totally unhelpful in helping us pin down the exact location. And what happened when the shed burned down or the fence fell over or got moved? How was the new owner supposed to prove what was his?
I also noticed that the deed is for less land than what the 1841 taxes showed that he owned, so at some point he must have sold eight and a half acres of the original tract.
The date at the bottom of the deed is January 19, 1849, but that is the date it was recorded. In the actual wording of the deed, it says that the land was sold for $666 dollars on January 19, 1848. I though maybe this might be one of those times that somebody forgot it was a new year, being January and all, because it seemed a bit fishy that it would get recorded exactly a year to the day later, but the next deed in the book has the same dating discrepancy. This means that Silas had been living in Stewart County for at least eight years, and perhaps even as long as fifteen years. That is probably the longest that he'd ever lived in the same place in his whole life. This could be due to the fact that he had his aging parents living with him, but also because he had six children by 1845, which is an awfully big family to be dragging around!
And that's it for Georgia. We won't see the family again until 1850 in Arkansas, but the fact that they sold their land at the beginning of 1848 tells me that that is probably when they actually moved.
At least we pinned down one date that I can feel good about adding to the timeline!
And now, in conclusion, I have the following thoughts:
I am still marginally confused! (How about you? Trying to make sense of all these bits and pieces of information was a nightmare. Let me know if any of my reasoning doesn't make sense!)
These people were kind of nuts! Why would anyone want to move to an entirely new place every five years, where, unless they were lucky enough to draw a lot that had been formerly occupied by a member of the Creek tribe (in which case there might actually be a home and cleared fields waiting for them), they would have to clear land and build a new house?
I guess it is no wonder that Silas decided to move to Texas shortly after it became a state, when the Native Americans were being pushed further west and settlers were being actively recruited - moving on to newly opened lands was practically all he had ever known!
And next time, we'll look at the records I've found from the family's time in Arkansas and Texas.
- Therese
