Locating Ancestral Land in Maryland Land Records

William Biggerstaff was an ancestor of mine. A letter from Elizabeth Davis Thompson, back in the 70s, when I was just starting to dabble in genealogy, mentions several of his land records from 1744 - 1762. Pieces of land with names like Pleasant Level and Long Bottom, mentioning Tom's Creek and Antietem Creek, Frederick County, Prince George's County, and Hampshire County, Virginia.

Growing up on the farm in Iowa, our land didn't have official names. It had a legal description based on township, range, section, and portion of section. But when I was told to go out and plow, it wasn't go plow T5 R34 S34 SW4 NE4. It was go plow the back 40. Or cemetery hill. Or God forbid, goat hill.

If I told you the legal description of the land where I grew up, you could do a bit of research and find it on a map with little uncertainty. I've done this with ancestral land in Colorado, Kansas, Iowa, and Ohio. But this Maryland land, with a name and strange (to me) rivers and creeks and conflicting county names, how was I to find it?

Mrs. Thompson wrote that William Biggerstaff entered a patent for 50 acres call "Pleasant Level" in Prince Georges County in 1744 and sold Pleasant Level in Frederick County in 1748/9. Prince George's County is a long way from Frederick County today. Montgomery County and Washington DC lie in between. But obviously, Frederick County hadn't been formed yet. Wikipedia states that "Frederick County was created in 1748 from parts of Prince George's County and Baltimore County. Prince George's County Historical Society states that prior to the split, the county extended all the way to Pennsylvania. So that explains why Pleasant Level could be in both Prince George's County and Frederick County. But, Frederick County is a big area. Where is this land, exactly?

A little research led me to the Tracey Patent indexes. There is a lot of information on this page and it is tempting to start scrolling through pages of images, but believe me, that's the hard way. Mid-way down the page is the actual index. All that shows is the alphabet across the page with each letter being a link to the tracts of land names starting with that letter. So, in this case, I selected "P" for Pleasant Level. I soon found William Biggerstaff's Pleasant Level among all the other Pleasant Levels, valleys, meadows, hills, etc.

This doesn't tell me where the land is, but it does point to the actual land patent records. Highlighted in yellow are the lines "P G 1713" and "Sheet 283". This is patent number 1713 in Prince George's County, and details are on page 283 of Tracey's map images. More importantly, though, are the coordinates listed above, D 50. Going into the CFW images of the main Tracey page we quickly find those coordinates.

The land is in the highlighted area, an area of 1 square mile. If we zoom out a bit, we can determine roughly where this is.

Obviously, no towns are shown. The only landmarks are rivers and creeks. This land appears to be downstream from Friends Creek and Tom's Creek, which are tributaries of the Monocacy River. You can see Turkey Creek and Middle Creek nearby as well. The two top tiers, A and B of the grid, are in Pennsylvania, so we can tell this land, in the D tier, is only a mile or two south from the Pennsylvania line. With a little work, one can match this map up with a modern map, such as google maps and get within a mile or so of the land. So far we don't have the description of the land, and that will be necessary to really pinpoint it. I really need to see the detail provided on Tracey's images. The index card above points to sheet 283 and I found that sheet 1 is on image 259. I have found these images to be very slow in loading, so its nice to try to hit the right image pretty quickly. Eventually I found sheet 283 on image 562.

There's William Bigerstaff and Pleasant Level.We get a decent plat, gives us the shape, and the arrow points north so its upside down, but the only thing new it tells us that the land is on the south side of a tributary of Tom's Creek.

Another useful site in the Maryland Archives is the Prince George's County Circuit Court Records. Searching those leads us to the copies of the original patent. It provides a full metes and bounds description, but still no more information on the exact location of the land, i.e., where is the white oak tree on the south side of the creek and what creek is it?

At this point, I haven't found a way to pinpoint the property. Best I can do is to locate the features of the maps above on Google Maps.

Further online research into neighboring tracts of land might be helpful. But at this point, I think research in the courthouse might be necessary. Zooming in on Google Maps shows modern tracts of land, but the tracts don't match, which isn't a surprise after over 200 years.

Other ideas are welcome.

Where's the proof?

I absolutely love online genealogy. When I started genealogy in high school, in the mid 1970s, there was no "online". Computers were being used to make indexes, and that really helped, but the research had to be done with actual books and microfilms. Now, with records being scanned and processed with optical character recognition, genealogical records are being made available at an incredible pace. And people are sharing more than ever. The popularity of genealogy has increased steadily over the years, in large part due to the ease of going online to access records. But something really bothers me.

What bothers me is that there is a lot of incorrect information online. While the copies of original records are tremendous, the data shared by genealogists must be taken with a grain of salt. When I see information in personal family trees that is shared over and over again it is tempting to assume that it is correct, because it is so prevalent. But unfortunately, a lie told over and over again is still a lie. Of course, that is way too harsh. Most people have no interest in spreading something that is not true. But they are interested in extending their lines, and hopefully to some interesting ancestor, or even to just break through and continue their research. And sometimes information is posted, not as fact, but as theory, to encourage discussion and collaboration.

I've said that the online records are extremely valuable. But it is important to remember that they are never complete. Even if all the known records for a locality and time are online, it is possible that a birth didn't get recorded, that a page was missed, or records lost. It is too easy to adopt somebody as an ancestor just because they have the right age or name and nobody else can be found. Although that might be a good guess, it isn't proof. That new found ancestor extends the line, perhaps into some well-known line, maybe getting you back to that immigrant. But is it right?

Certainly, that person should be researched. Most people will look at the possibilities. Is the person the right age? Did he/she live in the right place? Could he/she have been the father/mother of the last known ancestor? Often, the answer is "yes". Is there evidence, or is it just the best guess available? Sometimes there isn't much evidence available. Sometimes it's circumstantial. We have to make assumptions. This is where we get into trouble. We need to go a little farther.

What we need to do is to attempt to prove that the proposed ancestor cannot be ours. If we eliminate him, we are closer to the truth. Below is an example from Ancestry.com. I have an ancestor, William Scofield, who was born in Connecticut ca. 1801 and lived in Cass County, Michigan. His adult life is reasonably well documented. But there were more than one William Scofields from Connecticut of his age, so its not a simple job to trace him back to his parents, even though Connecticut records are very good.

If we search the public trees of Ancestry.com for William Scofield, b ca 1801, Connecticut, d. ca. 1863 Cass County, Michigan, we find perhaps thirty or more trees suggesting that this William's parents were Daniel Hoyt Scofield and Abigail Trowbridge and show "William" as "William T." Clearly, the records show that William T. Scofield was the son of Daniel and Abigail, but was he the same as William of Cass County, Michigan? It is easy to blindly accept that as fact, and obviously many have done so.

When doing my search, one tree caught my eye, one tree with different parents listed. This tree, published by Ancestry user "evongohren", includes articles about William Scofield which prove that he cannot be the same person as William T. Scofield. He proves this is not possible by simply reviewing marriage and census records that show William T. stayed in Connecticut while William was in Oswego County, New York and Cass County, Michigan. Evongohren's  research paralleled mine in proving that William was not William T. But he has gone further and proposed other parents for William and has provided his reasoning for that, based on genealogical standards of evidence.

It is better for our research to end at a roadblock, than to accept an incorrect ancestral line. Perhaps we need a way to consider possible ancestors and make it clear that they are not proven.