How old did one need to be to obtain a patent? The usual answer is that one had to be of his majority (meaning 21 years old), but there were exceptions to this. The two Thomas sons in the Germanna family were issued a patent for 156 acres on 24 Jun 1726 (as John Tomer and Michael Tomer). John was born 17 Apr 1712, so he was 14 years of age. Michael was born after 1717, because he was not naturalized (and no birth record for him was found in Neuenbürg where the family lived). If you say he was born in 1719 (give or take a year), he would have been about 8 years of age. If you have any question as to whether the name Tomer was a mistake for Thomas, there can be no question because of the location of the land in the midst of Blankenbaker related tracts. (The boy’s mother was Anna Maria Blankenbaker.) We believe that John Thomas, the elder son, also obtained 400 acres on 28 Sep 1728. He would have been 16 years of age then. It is not safe to assume that a person is 21 just because a patent for land issues to them. Perhaps the law said they should be 21, but sometimes the law was ignored.
I am just picking a patent abstract at random, and I have chosen John Freeman, who had a patent for 300 acres of land in 1714. The abstract goes on to say that he paid for it with 10 shillings (that was the price for 100 acres), and with four head rights (called the importation of 4 persons): John Anngilly, Joseph Holland, Andrew Gifford, and Samuel Markham. So, we see that this one patent used two of the payment methods for the land, cash and head rights. Slaves could be used as head rights also, and the clue that slaves were being used was that they had only one name. The patent to Adam Eager (in the previous Note, Nr. 1419) mentioned neither cash nor head rights, but it did say the land was in Spotsylvania County. At this time it was the law that land was free in Spotsylvania and Brunswick Counties.
The people in the land office (or the surveyor) said Adam Eager’s land was "on the south side of Mount Poni". And, to be consistent, when they wrote up John Gordon’s patent for 800 acres, it ran to "the foot of Mount Poni".
We have been discussing sales by the Crown, directly to individuals. There was one very large grant of land by the Crown, to the loyal supporters of Charles II, amounting to about 8 million acres. These people, eventually only one, then sold the land to individuals. Since this land was the northern part of Virginia, it was called the "Northern Neck". Technically, it was defined as the land between the Rappahannock Rivers and the Potomac Rivers. People who bought land in the Northern Neck were two steps removed from the Crown. Instead of dealing with the Crown, they dealt with the Northern Neck proprietor. Thus, the Germantown tract of 1800+ acres was a purchase from the Northern Neck proprietor, and different rules applied. For one thing, they did not get a patent, but they got a grant. The Northern Neck proprietor, Lord Fairfax, was not going to give land away. The only payment method he would accept was cash. No head rights or free land there.
(29 Jun 02)
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.