Granville Proprietary Land Office Records

By: William D. Bennett, Pub. 1988, Reprinted 2019, 8 1/2" x 11", soft cover, 184 pages, Index, ISBN #0-89308-995-8. These are the so-called "Granville Grants" from the Secretary of State Land Grant Office (held by the NC State Archives) for the original Orange County area, including what became Chatham, Caswell, Alamance, Person, and parts of Guilford, Rockingham, Randolph, and Wake Counties. A detailed introduction by George Stevenson, supplemented by the editor's research, explains what the Granville Proprietary was and the records created by it's Land Office. In his abstracts of the deeds, Mr. Bennett has included the metes and bounds description, the neighboring land owners, the surveys and plats with the names of the chain bearers and facsimile copies of the signatures of the grantees and the witnesses. This volume provides the at-home researcher with all the information to be found from examination of the original documents. There are 428 of these grants, of which less than 50 appear in surviving Orange County Deed Books. Since this is the one place where the researcher is apt to find his ancestor's signature (many wills and deeds not having survived), it is particularly convenient for the researcher to have a reproduction of the signature with the survey, plat, and abstract of the deed. The author has also included a notation as to the Patent Book and Deed Book where the grant is recorded. The format of this particularly useful book is pleasing. because of its size and location, Orange County is a pivotal county in tracing North Carolina lineages.