We have been discussing the Tithe Lists giving the names of the people who were on the lists, especially on a portion of the 1739 Orange County list. What is useful and fun to do is to compare this list with the maps of the original patents. One soon detects that the Tithe List was not made up at random, but appears to be the result of a man actually going in the field and proceeding from house to house.
D. R. Carpenter created a map of original patents in 1940. The Germanna Foundation published this, and it was published also in Beyond Germanna in the Volume 2, Number 4, issue for July 1990. I used Carpenter's work as the starting point for redrawing the map, which was shown in Beyond Germanna in Volume 8, Number 4. Essentially this map is being shown on the following web page: Germanna Land Patent Maps
I extended the map to the north in Beyond Germanna in Volume 8, Number 5 (September 1996), and to the south in the following issue for November 1996. This last map is also shown on the web page above. I worked out some more of the details along the modern Culpeper and Madison County line in Volume 9, Number 2. An extension to the east appeared in Volume 9, Number 5. Also, John Huffman's land in "Madison" was worked out in Volume 10, Number 3.
Finally, more than 110 original land patents were plotted in Beyond Germanna in Volume 10, Number 6, in which all of the previous were included. Never have I published a plot without feeling that there were errors in it. Of course, if I knew where the errors were, I would have corrected them. Usually, after publicationN and after doing some more work on any plotting, I find that it can be improved. In short, it is a very humbling experience. It is also a lot of fun.
When the 1739 tithe list is compared to the map, one feels that he is walking along in the footsteps of the creator of the tithable list. In doing so, one finds where some people were living, whose previous location had not been known. I first located the approximate area for John Harnsberger in this way.
One could wish that more Tithe Lists had been saved because they are so useful in locating people; however, given a list of this type, the first thing one must do is to verify that the list was prepared in some way corresponding to the geography. Sometimes this takes a preliminary map. Then one can extend the range and fill in the gaps.
I suspect that the Culpeper Classes were prepared using geography as a guide in specifying the names. When you pick a class in a neighborhood about which you know something, you can usually identify it by some of the people, and the additional names tell who else was living in that neighborhood.
(09 Dec 00)
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.