Andersons of Colonial N. Carolina

I recently won an award for this blog and was contacted by email by a man named David McCorkle. He was persuaded to be the head of the North Carolina Genealogical Society (NCGS) and hence, is the guy who has to see that the toilets are cleaned and emails are sent out. Little did I realize that he was my hero. To explain: several years ago, to my delight, this website was created: https://nclandgrants.com/ . If you scroll down that page you will find the “ABOUT” link… therein you will find the history of how David created the website. NClandgrants is where I go to play… and find the seeds to grow my maps.

This Post is a hat tip to David… in an email he let slip that “My ancestors settled in Mecklenburg which nobody has mapped, so if you ever find yourself with nothing to do…”

In practical terms… this is not a Mecklenburg map, per se, but merely a “study”… the real deal would be an undertaking such as my Chowan “Precinct” map which is a grand ordeal. It seems that in 1762 or so the county was formed with the unspoken proviso that everything westerly of the area was considered in the county (meaning the county extended to the Mississippi River, by implication, at least). By 1768 the toady and often intoxicated government types realized that Holy Moly! there are more people flooding into the landscape than we can handle… So in desperation they stopped Mecklenberg at the Catawba River and declared everything to the west of that river to be Tryon County… then they adjourned and went to the local tavern for a Madiera, smiling that they had passed off a chore to some other toady government types who drink as opposed to working. Anyone who has studied North Carolina “county formations” soon realizes that this is the game they played. And I am convinced they were all drunks. With that in mind, I soon realized that the ancestors of David McCorkle were in that “western” part of Olde Mecklenberg, which is left vaporized in the fog of history and never “actually” existed… if you catch my drift. Luckily clues were left in the Metes and Bounds.

Of course my first stop was the 1911 map which quickly proved useless although it was interesting…

A reprint can be found on Amazon and elsewhere… but then I am an Edgecombe County snob and this interests me more for the history… particularly the Indian Traders who ventured down that way… but I digress.

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Click the Blue Filename above to open a better image…

Much to my dismay I cannot find any “historic” USGS maps for this area of NC. So I am left floundering in search of something without all the modern abominations like railroads and the utterly abhorrent Interstate Highways…Hell, I don’t appreciate anything paved on these maps. Tiny Towns are ok but barely. I do realize that it is important to our modern sensibilities to have some frame of reference but ye gads! they did not have concrete freaking bridges back in the day…they were wood if they did manage to erect one (which was not very often).

Below are 2 examples of what I refer to as “data sheets”… these contains the who, what, where, when and sometimes why of the people I map. When you put all this “data” together on a map it is magical. The more puzzle pieces you find and add, the more accurate the map becomes. And keep in mind that the surveyor’s metes and bounds of yesteryear are as accurate today as the year they were made (even though the trees cited in the survey are almost assuredly dead and gone and any stakes long since rotted away).

The patent below drives home the point that in 1762 when this patent was issued it was in Mecklenburg. But by 1769 an adjoining patent was proclaimed to be in Tryon County. Neither of those counties are anywhere near where this land is today. All of which explains my fondness for getting inebriated… capiche?

In the data sheet above note where I have begun to make associations of nearby landowners… some of my data sheets are marvels of investigative magic. And hence, a question for Mr McCorkle: How cool would it be on a map if one could click on a pretty yellow patent and be taken to a data sheet? An example of such an animal is below… although it is entirely unassociated with this Mecklenberg map… it is associated with my Chowan map. And how cool would this be to a researcher?