The Colonial Record Project of the Library of Virginia makes available abstracts or notes on the items in its collection. If you can access pages on the web (on the Internet), then you can obtain images of the cards in the index file. If you select one for more study, they will download or send a file to your computer. To see this, you need a TIFF viewer (this is just an acronym for Tagged Image Format File which is a standard method for encoding images). If you do not have this program, you can download it from the library. (I use the ability of my WordPerfect program to do this.) After the file is converted, it can be read or printed as an image (picture).
The records from England which the library microfilmed and indexed are not available as images. One can read the short abstracts of them as images. But to obtain a copy of these documents requires an on-site presence at a microfilm reader. On occasion I have selected documents to be copied or printed. But there is a class of records at the library for which images of the original document are available. In particular I refer to the early land patents (from the Crown) and the grants (in the Northern Neck). You can transfer these files to your computer and then convert them to images.
Saturday night I did some research on the land patents and grants of Jacob Holtzclaw of the First Germanna Colony. I was particularly interested in his 1300 acre grant in the Little Fork district of today's Culpeper Co., but a part of Orange Co. at the time. By the water ways, it lies between the North Fork of the Rappahannock (Hedgman) River and the Hazel River. The land between the North Fork of the Rappahannock and the South Fork of the Rappahannock, also called the Rapidan, is the Great Fork. So the Little Fork is also a part of the Great Fork.
On September 27, 1729, Jacob Holtzclaw obtained a patent for 680 acres in this area when the land was thought to be outside the Northern Neck. So he took out a patent from the King for this. Later, ca 1748, he extended his holdings to the 1300 acres mentioned above, including the 680 acres, and took a grant from Lord Fairfax for this amount. By then, the land was considered a part of the Northern Neck. Many people did take out grants on land they had previously patented to make sure they had all the bases covered. But whether one did this or not, the quit rents were now due to Lord Fairfax now, not the King.
Returning to the basic story, I downloaded the file which conveyed the image of the grant to Holtzclaw by Fairfax. I converted the bytes into an image and read the essential information in the metes and bounds, the description by angles and distances of the outline of the tract. I entered these into the DeedMapper (TM) program developed by a Germanna descendant, Steve Broyles, and plotted the area. So sitting at my desk at home, I obtained a copy of the grant and used the data "to walk around" the perimeter of the tract. Then I placed the tract on an overlay of the waterways and roads. By the time I was done, it was well past my bedtime but I had hardly noticed the time as I was having so much fun.
Jacob Holtzclaw of the First Germanna Colony, besides being a school teacher, a reader at church, and a farmer, was also active as a land speculator. He obtained many hundreds of acres and invited people from Germany to come and settle on these lands. Not surprisingly, many of the people were neighbors or relatives from Germany. I have mentioned most of these people here earlier. They came from about 1730 to 1750.
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.