The Fairfax family employed a series of agents to grant un-claimed lands to individuals who filed the appropriate papers plus an application fee. The agent then issued a warrant to have the property marked off, with the farmer being responsible for paying to have the land actually surveyed. The warrant and completed survey were then returned to the agent, who issued a title in fee simple. The annual quit rents that elsewhere in Virginia would have gone to the Crown were paid instead to the Proprietor or his agent. The Northern Neck warrants and surveys have been abstracted and thoroughly indexed by Peggy Shomo Joyner (Abstracts of Virginia’s Northern Neck Warrants & Surveys. Portsmouth, VA: Peggy S. Joyner, 1985-87, 4 vols.), while the original patents and grants have been abstracted and indexed by Nell Marion Nugent and Susan Bracey Sheppard (Cavaliers and Pioneers: Abstracts of Virginia Land Patents and Grants: Supplement, Northern Neck Grants No. 1, 1690-1692. Richmond, VA: Virginia State Library, 1980, iii, 18 p.), and Gertrude E. Gray (Virginia Northern Neck Land Grants, 1694-1742 [and] Volume II, 1742-1775. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1987-88, 2 vols.). All are readily accessible to the researcher. The quit rent rolls which undoubtedly existed for every county and every year have largely been lost; the few which survive for Stafford County are reproduced in this volume.
Grants were normally inherited according to primogeniture, usually by the landholder’s eldest surviving son, or, failing any sons, by his other heirs, as provided by the Virginia law of the time; plantations could also be willed to a combination of heirs, subject to certain restrictions (provision had to be made for the widow, for example). Lands which escheated (i.e., reverted to the lord of the fee where there were no heirs capable of inheriting under the original grant) could be (and were) regranted by the Proprietor to new landholders; these new grants appear in the Northern Neck grant books. However, subsequent dispositions of Northern Neck land—plus wills—are recorded in the record books of the counties in which the land was located. In Stafford County, the early records volumes often included a mixture of deeds and wills and inventories and even election returns in one volume, although the usual practice by the eighteenth century was to alternate predominantly deed and will books in the numbering sequence. The earliest Stafford records books are labeled Liber [Latin for “book”] A, B, C, etc., through Z, and then AA, BB, CC, etc. Because of the irregular way in which the Stafford records were kept, two or more books would often overlap in date spans.
The Problem of Boundaries
One of the major problems facing the Stafford researcher is determining the boundary line between Stafford and King George Counties at any particular time. At least three realignments in county jurisdictions are known to have occurred in this part of the Northern Neck during the eighteenth century (not counting the formation of new counties). Prior to 1777, both counties were long, narrow strips flanking the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers. Up to the point where the Potomac River turns north, at Potomac Creek in Stafford County, the Northern Neck varies in width from roughly six to twenty miles, the narrowest sections occurring in present-day King George and Westmoreland Counties. There are swamps and creeks lining both sides of the Neck. A small ridge or rise of rolling hills runs down the middle of the peninsula. The original line between the two counties was defined by these small runs: i.e., if one’s land was located in the Stafford/King George area and included a creek (or was between two such creeks) that drained to the Rappahannock River, that land per se was considered located in King George Co. Unfortunately, the farms straddling the boundary line often existed in a kind of legal limbo, since there are points on the ridge where the gap between observable water courses exceeds one-half mile. The practical problems caused by such an ill-defined boundary between the two counties became so acute that about 1751 a commission was appointed to survey the line and to settle the disputes permanently. The result was predictable: a dozen or two families formerly recorded in one county suddenly found themselves transferred to the other without ever actually having moved.
For example, this writer’s ancestor, Edward Burges(s), purchased 100 acres of land in King George County in 1731, the deed specifically describing the farm as being both in Stafford and King George Counties. Prior to the year 1750, Edward Burgess appears only in King George records; after that date, he appears only in Stafford County records, his will being recorded there in 1759. Yet it is clear from later deed and tax records that Edward and his heirs never moved, that his 100-acre farm, located behind the present-day village of Comorn, Virginia (about where county highway 608 terminates), was continually occupied by the Burgess family between 1731-1788, being finally sold by Edward’s absent grandchildren in 1797, in still another King George Co. deed. During these fifty-seven years “Pudding Hill” (the Burgess farm) changed jurisdictions twice, first from King George Co. to Stafford Co. about 1751, and then from Stafford back to King George in 1777.
Eventually, the awkwardness caused by the elongated county jurisdictions became sufficiently annoying to the major plantation owners that several petitions were circulated beginning in 1769 in both Stafford and King George Cos. to reorient the boundaries along more rational (squared-off) lines. Two of these are reproduced in this book; the numbers of attached signatures indicate wide popular support for the change. The onset of the Revolutionary War caused several delays in consideration and approval of the bill, but it was finally passed in 1776, with effect from 1 January 1777. At that date, the boundary line between Stafford and King George Counties was altered to its present-day location, along Muddy Creek and the Black Swamp Branch of Potomac Creek—that is, the northern half of King George County (including the town of Falmouth) was transferred to Stafford County, and the southern half of Stafford (encompassing the inhabitants of St. Paul’s Parish) was put under the jurisdiction of King George. A second change in 1779 similarly reoriented the boundaries (by trading off several smaller, overlapping areas) of Westmoreland and King George Counties. New county courthouses were erected at their present inland, more central locations by the 1780s (previously, the courthouses of both counties had been located at several different sites along the banks of their respective boundary rivers).
These changes transferred a third to a half of the residents of the northern end of the Northern Neck into new counties; thus, the determination of an individual’s actual place of residence is an essential first step in conducting genealogical research in Stafford and King George Counties during the colonial period.
The Loss of Records
The second major problem plaguing students of Staffordiana is the destruction of many of its earliest deed and will records. It is a misnomer to call Stafford a “burned records county,” since the courthouse was not actually destroyed by the invading Union army during the Civil War. Unfortunately, however, the little town of Stafford Courthouse was situated on a major invasion route between Washington, D.C., and Fredericksburg, and suffered multiple occupations by the military forces of both sides throughout the war; and while the courthouse itself was not burned or apparently even looted, it was abandoned on several occasions by county officials, to the point where several federal officers removed old record books ostensibly for the purpose of preserving them. Contemporary descriptions of the courthouse further indicate that it had reached a state of disrepair even before the Civil War, and that some of the missing books may have crumbled simply from lack of maintenance. Whatever the reason, it is an unfortunate fact that better than two-thirds of the records books known to have existed in the 1792 inventory do not survive today, although missing volumes have continued to surface every other decade or so at various locations around the country.
The surviving pre-1800 books include: Liber D (1686-92), Liber F (1699-1709), Liber I (also called J; 1722-28), Liber M (1730-48), Liber O (1747-54), Liber P (1754-64), Liber S (1780-89), and several unnumbered order books dating from 1664-68 and 1689-92. All the extant books were abstracted and thoroughly indexed in nine published volumes between 1987-1989 by Ruth and Sam Sparacio of
McLean, VA, and are available from the compilers, as well as in many genealogical libraries. In addition, a contemporaneous index book exists at the Stafford County Courthouse, with a copy at the Virginia State Archives collection at Richmond; this volume includes a brief running list of the deeds and wills included in each book through the early nineteenth century, with the indexes for some of the libers missing (there are also pages missing from some of the extant indexes); about half the listings record data from volumes that no longer survive. Although included in the Embrey Index, it has not otherwise been abstracted.
About This Book
Vogt and Kethley’s book brings together into two volumes both previously published and hitherto untranscribed Colonial and Revolutionary War tax, quit rent, and related lists; it undoubtedly represents the last major uncollected cache of early Stafford County documents that will ever be assembled for the researcher, barring the discovery of additional Stafford County records volumes. Its importance for the student of early Virginiana should not be underestimated.
Stafford County enjoyed a prominence in eighteenth-century Virginia which has long since faded. Its plantation owners included some of the major political and cultural figures of the Revolutionary War period and before, and its central location, including a major tobacco port at New Marleboro (or New Marlborough), on the large inlet of Potomac Creek, made it a common arrival and transit point for immigrants prior to the building of Washington, DC, during the 1790s. During the 1680s, Huguenots were actively encouraged to settle in Stafford County through grants of land, and hundreds came. Many of these émigrés moved on to other parts of northern Virginia, having lived for a few years or decades or generations in Stafford; by the end of the Revolutionary War, as the western territories of Kentucky and Tennessee began to attract new settlers, the exodus became marked, numerous families leaving the eastern seaboard permanently between the years 1780-1800.
With the loss of the 1790 and 1800 Virginia censuses, all that officially remains of many of these persons is their mention on the personal property tax rolls levied statewide beginning in 1782. Every free white male of the age of twenty-one years or over was required to pay a minimum poll tax, plus additional sums for specific categories of personal belongings (including, at various times, horses, cattle, wagons, watches, hogs, and, of course, Negroes). The real estate registers were maintained completely separately. Beginning in 1787, the rolls also included white males of the ages of 16-21, often enumerated by name with their parents or guardians. Even those exempt—paupers, widows, certain professionals—had to be listed, making the tax registers virtually year-by-year censuses of each Virginia county. Through a systematic perusal of these rolls, one can guess at family relationships, estimate the ages of sons who appear with their fathers between their twenty-first and twenty-second birthdays, and determine when families have left the area (and possibly match their reappearances elsewhere in the surviving tax lists of other Virginia and Kentucky counties). When joined with surviving deed, will, and other records, the tax lists can often verify or support genealogical hypotheses established elsewhere.
Vogt and Kethley have been extraordinarily careful and meticulous in their transcriptions. All of the lists, including the few previously published elsewhere, have been copied or recopied from the original documents, or from microform reproductions of same. Column notations, which often vary from page to page in the originals, have been maintained exactly as written. Spellings have been rendered precisely as penned, included the raised abbreviations for given names so common during this period. Page breaks on the original lists are carefully noted. Names which could not be read are so noted; textual breaks and cut-outs are precisely marked. Sources or locations of the originals are always stated. Relatively few lists survive prior to the inauguration of the personal property tax registers, but Vogt and Kethley have managed to assemble an astonishing number of hitherto unknown and unpublished records, including an extraordinary 1779 petition that includes several hundred residents, surely a large percentage of the free white males then resident in the county. The index is comprehensive and easy to follow.
One can lament the many gaps in Stafford County tax, deed, and will records prior to 1800, and wish that fate had been kinder to documents which might have revealed many permanently-buried secrets of the families in this region. In the end, however, one can only be thankful for what does survive. Let us applaud the wide sweep and careful accuracy of Vogt and Kethley’s scholarship, encourage them to produce additional volumes in this series, and thank them both for a job exceptionally well done.
27. THE BRUSH OF ÆONS
GEORGE ZEBROWSKI’S FICTIONAL UNIVERSE (1991)
Like Olaf Stapledon before him, George Zebrowski paints his fictive vistas with the brush of æons, adding and subtracting galaxies and centuries with great slashing strokes. Not for him are the crabbed miniatures of most science-fiction novelists, whose collective vision barely extends over the next hill. Zebrowski is concerned with the “big picture,” the long-term fate of mankind, the end (and the beginning) of things, the how and where and particularly the why of life, the universe, and everything. Where so many of his compatriots are now producing western, mystery, and mainstream novels with SF trappings, sequel upon sequel upon inanity, this author has written and continues to pen brilliant science fictions which could be presented in no other conceivable form.
Beginning life as the child of Polish parents displaced by World War II, Zebrowski grew up in England, Manhattan, Miami, and the Bronx, even then a wasteland of broken dreams and deadened hopes. He began reading science fiction at an early age, and was writing his first stories in the 1960s. In 1970 he published “The Water Sculptor,” the first of a hundred stories which quickly earned him numerous award nominations. The author’s first novel, The Omega Point (1972), later expanded into The Omega Point Trilogy (1983), provided an initial showcase for Zebrowski’s cosmic visions of man and the universe. These early fictions pale, however, before the sweep and impact of the writer’s first major novel, Macrolife (1979), which would ensure him a place in the SF Hall of Fame even if he never wrote another word.
Zebrowski had penned the first drafts of Macrolife as early as 1964, although the book was not completed until fifteen years later. In a near-future Earth, the discovery of bulerite (named for the Bulero family) has revolutionized architecture and economics. Lightweight, versatile, stronger than steel, bulerite has enabled the construction of huge cityplexes, and facilitated the exploration of near-Earth space, with the subsequent colonization of Mars, the asteroids, and several of the larger moons in the Solar System. Unknown to the Buleros, however, bulerite is inherently unstable, and as structures made of the element begin to disintegrate or explode, they pull civilization down with it. Three of the Buleros—Richard, Sam, and Janet—escape to Asterome, a hollowed-out, ten-mile-long asteroid in Earth orbit, along with other scattered refugees from the devastated planet below. Earth is enveloped in an impenetrable cloud, with no hope of any life surviving the incessant lightning storms raging over its surface.
Asterome represents the first stage of macrolife, a self-sufficient, self-contained structure that will eventually spread intelligent life to every part of the universe. Eventually, Asterome leaves the Solar System, traveling to nearby stars, and utilizing the raw materials from their planets to construct new macrolife globes as its own compartments become crowded, or as social divisions develop among the populace. The flexibility of this arrangement, and the gradual lengthening of life-spans, enable humanity to grow literally without limits, to avoid frictions that might lead to war, to develop intellectually and emotionally in ways never before contemplated. Eventually, an alien macrolife unit is located, one of many such structures traversing the galaxy, and contact is made, to the mutual benefit of both races. The mental links between these groups seem to promise another stage in the development of mankind.
Eventually, a hundred billion years later, all intelligence has merged into one gro
up mind. But the universe is winding down toward ultimate nullity, when all matter will collapse into the final explosion. John Bulero, a clone of Samuel Bolero, suddenly finds his consciousness reconstituted for some ultimate decision. Is there something more? the intelligences ask. Can anything survive the final debacle? The answers to these questions lead Bulero to the third level of macrolife, a consciousness so powerful that it can create its own universes, can transcend time and space itself.
Zebrowski’s next major novel, Stranger Suns (1991), represents a further fifteen years of effort, an early draft having been published in much abridged form in 1975. Juan Obrion and his three companions discover an abandoned alien spaceship buried deep in the Antarctic ice. The ship admits them, then abruptly takes off for an unknown destination. The explorers discover matter replicators within the ship that solve their immediate problems of food and water supply, but no sign of the race which had constructed the vessel. They determine that the aliens have built a network of way stations within the suns of both our galaxy and its neighbors; these sophisticated facilities have similarly been abandoned, as have the surface structures found on a barren planet at the end of the chain. Eventually Juan and his friends determine that a set of black panels in the ship’s bowels connect directly through hyperspace to similar panels on two other vessels left within the Solar System, one buried in the Amazon jungle, the other on the Moon, and to other alien vessels and facilities, enabling instantaneous movement through tremendous distances.
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