The Northern Neck boundaries were finally settled by an Order of the Privy Council on 11 April 1745. Altogether, it encompassed 5,280,000 acres, and included the present day counties of Northumberland, Lancaster, Westmoreland, Richmond, Stafford, Rappahannock, Fauquier, Culpeper, Frederick, Madison, Clarke, Warren, Page, Shenandoah, and, in West Virginia, Hardy, Hampshire, Morgan, Berkeley, and Jefferson. Prior to the Order of the Privy Council , Madison, Culpeper, and Rappahannock had not been included. The order also made some changes in the Shenandoah Valley. A survey of the region was undertaken, and was completed in 1746. Lord Fairfax returned to Virginia from England in May of 1747, and he resumed signing grants, transfers of land from himself to the purchasers.
To obtain a tract of land in the Proprietary, an individual appeared before the agent for Lord Fairfax and suggested the existence of a specific piece of vacant land. The buyer had first to find a piece of unclaimed land to purchase. When the individual made application he paid a set fee called the "composition". The agent then wrote a "warrant", which directed a specific surveyor to mark the property so described for the individual. The purchaser then made arrangements for the survey of the specified tract.
Once that the survey was completed, it, and the original warrant, were returned to the Proprietor's Office, where the agent, on behalf of the Proprietor, gave title in fee simple through an instrument called a grant. Besides the composition fee, the purchaser also had to pay an annual rent of two shillings sterling per hundred acres (sometimes stated as one shilling per fifty acres). An original parchment of the grant was given the owner, a record of this was made in a bound volume, and the warrant, survey, and supplemental papers were filed. These supplement papers could include many things, but often were intended to show the right of the person in whose name the grant was issued to have the grant. From the original warrant to the grant, there might be a change of rights to the land resulting from sale or death, and the supplemental documents were intended to show how the rights were transferred. Since the process from the warrant to the grant could take several years, it was not uncommon to have such a change of ownership. These supplemental documents were kept indefinitely in the Northern Neck office, unlike the Colonial Land Office, where they were destroyed annually.
In 1785, the Virginia General Assembly terminated the Proprietorship and had the records of the Northern Neck transferred to the Land Office. Besides the twenty-four bound volumes of the grants, the warrants, surveys, and supplemental papers were sent along also. The state of Virginia assumed the issuance of grants and continued in the last volume ("S") that the proprietor had been using. The supplemental papers were never recorded but were kept and finally transferred to the State Library.
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.