We are fortunate to have a few scraps of paper with the Tithe Lists for Orange County in the late 1730s. They are not complete for the entire county, but they do have a good representation of the Germanna Robinson River community. I published selections in Beyond Germanna, vol. 2, and used the D. R. Carpenter map of 1940 to show that the compilers of the Tithe List seemed to wander over the country side in a systematic way. Different people were responsible for recording different parts of the county.
In the list of compiler James Picket, he has one sub-sequence of names which, using my spelling except where noted otherwise, is:
Then a little farther along in his list Picket gives:
In the list of John Mickell, which covered an area generally north of the Robinson River, we have this sequence:
Since the immigrant head of the Broyles family, Johannes Breyhel (John Broyles) had already died (will proved in 1734, new style), we have three Broyles sons, namely Cortney, Christley, and Jacob in the Tithe List. We were expecting, based on the German records and the importation records, to have brothers Jacob and Conrad, and a sister Mary Catherine. The additional of Christley was a surprise. Apparently he was born here, which would seem to be possible since his mother was probably in her late 30s.
After 1739, there is no further record of Christley (which is probably a nick name for Christian). As Steve Broyles has mentioned, John Broyles, the father, was the apparent owner of 400 acres of land. This seems to have been divided this into four parts, which would correspond to Conrad, Jacob, Mary Catherine, and Christian.
It is Conrad who seems to be living close to the site that we have been talking about recently. He remains in the community. It is Christian who disappears.
The entire list of names from Orange County (but this not all of Orange County) can be read in Peggy Shomo Joyner's "
Northern Neck Warrants & Surveys, Orange & Augusta Counties
". These names alone justify the price of the book. There were other surprises such as two Lewis Fishers, two Theobald Crislers, and unidentified Conrad Pater (Slater?), George Tanner, and Henry Crowder.
(14 Feb 03)
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.