Continuing the discussion of the patent of Robert Tanner (Gerber in German), the patent tells us it is for 216 acres of new land in St. George's Parish of Spotsylvania Co., where Tanner also lived. It was in the great fork of the Rappahannock River on the north side of the Robinson River. It was issued 28 September 1728.
It began at a white walnut and a sycamore with a corner to Jacob Crigelor (Crigler). From this point, one line ran north 15 degrees east (n15e) for 200 poles with Crigler's line at which point there should be three pines. It was also a corner where Crigler, Jacob Broyles, Cyriacus and Peter Fleshman met.
The next course was s75e (south 75 degrees east) for 200 poles with the line of the said S. & P. Fleshman to a point marked by a pine and two red oaks which was also another corner of S. & P. Fleshman.
The next course was s40w for 100 p. (poles) to three white oaks. The next course was s20w for 110 p to three white oaks and a corner of Smith Island line.
The next course was given in the patent as s50w for 60 p but the plot works better with s55w for 20 p at which point it reaches the river (Robinson).
The next course is up the meanders of the river to the beginning. No angles or distances are given for this meander up the river which, as implied by the name, would take several parts to completely describe it.
All of this is embedded in a lot of boilerplate language as any transfer of property is. If you wanted to see what the lay of the land was, you could plot it, preferably on tracing paper laid over a map of the area. You need three tools, a protractor, a ruler, and a calculator to scale your drawing from the map dimensions to the patent description. As you draw it, you could slide the paper around on the map to see if you could improve the fit.
It would help in locating the property, if you knew where the Fleshman, Broyle and Crigler lands were because they are adjacent properties. So you might want to get the data on these patents and try plotting them also. In turn they may name other neighbors and you might want them also. Sometimes a patent will be very specific about a geographic feature and no recourse to other patents is needed. These anchor stones are very helpful.
The frustrating elements are the lack of information to pin a plot down, an inconsistent description of a tract, and a lack of harmony to neighboring tracts. One thinks that the patents would completely fill up a map very neatly but seldom does this occur. They overlap in some cases or they leave voids in other cases. Many times the description is erroneous as can be seen by looking at the data. A course that should be s50w, is given as n50e which makes it exactly opposite to the intended direction. When the Tanner patent above was plotted, a better fit to the physical conditions was obtained by changing one of the courses.
Fortunately, computer programs exist [for example, DeedMapper (TM)], which make the plotting of deeds easier than the manual methods. The pursuit of land records is fun and time consuming. Perhaps nothing delights descendants more than locating the land of their ancestor. But the results are not easily obtained.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.