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In 1782 the General Assembly of Virginia enacted new tax laws which
created within each county an enumeration of land and certain personal property. These
early land tax laws required a tax commissioner in each district of a county to record a
list of the names of persons owning land or town lots, the quantity of land owned and its
value, and the amount of tax owed. By 1813, a brief geographic description (usually
citing an adjacent stream, road, or other landmark) was required; in 1814, the distance
and direction from the courthouse for each parcel was also added to the tax rolls.
The present work is an alphabetical listing of all 1815 landowners found in
each county, as well as the accompanying description of the location of the said property.
We have not included the number of acres, taxes assessed, or any transactions between
landowners which may have been noted on the tax rolls; also, in many cases the
geographic location was provided as "adjacent to John Smith", etc. and, while useful many
times to a genealogist, was considered to be beyond the objectives of this project. The
reader is encouraged to consider the information here-in as an "outline" of early
landowners in Virginia rather than a "text" due to the year-to-year variation in
information provided to the clerk (or recorded by the clerk), omissions, lack of
"identifiers" to determine if "same name" was also "same person" within a district or
across districts, marginal quality/clarity (in a few cases) of the microfilm copy, and, not
least, errors on the part of either the original clerks or the current author while
transcribing.
Some of the approaches to utilizing the 1815 landowner information include:
FORMAT OF PRESENTATION: Each entry is listed as: Surname,
name,
personal identifiers (if any); location/place-name of land; miles/direction from the 1815
courthouse. If multiple owners are listed for a property, the listing is duplicated under
each of the owner's surnames (i.e "Smith and Brown" is also listed as "Brown, --see
Smith"); when multiple owners share a common surname, the property is only listed
once. When a landowner had land at more than one location/place-name, the
miles/direction listing for each parcel is in the same sequence as the location listing (i.e.
James RV, Slate CK; 12N, 5SW.). In the few cases where a landowner had "many"
parcels, the miles/direction notation is attached to the location listing (i.e. Sandy RV-
5NE, Willow CK-7S, etc.)
The following is a list of county booklets for the
1815 Directory of Virginia Landowners
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