Granville Proprietary Land Office Records

By: William D. Bennett, Pub. 1990, Reprinted 2019, Index, 8 1/2" x 11", soft cover, 94 pages, ISBN #0-89308-994-X. In this important volume are abstracts of surviving loose papers from the Granville proprietary Land Office concerning Orange County. These papers include Entries, Warrants to the Surveyor and Surveys. Over a thousand documents concerning land in present Wake, Caswell, Person, Orange, Durham, Allamance, Chatham, Rockingham, Guilford, Randolph, and Stokes Counties have been abstracted. These records cover the period from the formation of Orange County in 1752 until the closing of the Granville Proprietary Land Office in 1763. The information from the papers in the Granville Proprietary Land Office may be the date of entry with a rough description of the land including the waterway and names of neighboring land owners, the warrant, the survey with names of chain bearers, sometimes the date the deed was issued, and any assignment that may have occurred along the way. What this does is place people in a particular place at a particular time up to forty years before the first census and prior to the Revolution. The Index contains more than 1,500 names.