HelPeR - BYU Idaho Special Collections and Family History

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claim to include every resident of Charleston for the
period under investigation, it nonetheless identifies
over 13,000 persons who lived and/or worked there
between 1782 and 1802.
South Carolinians in the Revolution With
Service Records and Miscellaneous
Data—Also Abstracts of Wills, Laurens
County (Ninety-Six District) 1775-1855
By Sara Sullivan Ervin;
Originally printed in 1949;
Reprinted 2008; 5.5x8.5; 230
pp; softbound; indexed. Order
from the publisher at:
Clearfield Company, Inc.,
3600 Clipper Mill Road,
Suite 260, Baltimore, MD
21211; or www.genealogical.com;
CF1690; ISBN:
9780806301044; $24.00 plus
$4.00 p&h.
Assembled in this work
are the names of the men and women who rendered
Revolutionary service in South Carolina, with proof
collected from various sources and brought together
for the first time by a competent compiler. Heading
the list of contents is the South Carolina Pension
Roll. Also included are the following: Names of Officers,
Continental Establishment; Medical Men of
the American Revolution; Men of General Sumter’s
Brigade; Revolutionary Prisoners; South Carolina
Women of the Revolution; Ancestral Roll of the
S.C.D.A.R.; Additional Rolls of Military Companies;
Soldiers of Other States; and Genealogies of Families
Descended from S.C. Revolutionary Soldiers.
The abstracts of Laurens County wills run 40 pages,
name thousands of persons, and are arranged in
alphabetical order by the name of the testator.
Tennessee
Earliest Tennessee Land Records
& Earliest Tennessee Land History
By Irene M. Griffey, CG; Originally printed in
2000; Reprinted 2008; 6x9; 506 pp; softbound. Order
from the publisher at: Clearfield Company, Inc.,
3600 Clipper Mill Road, Suite 260, Baltimore, MD
21211; or www.genealogical.com; CF9404; ISBN:
9780806350417; $52.50 plus $4.00 p&h.
Once in a generation, someone compiles a genealogy
reference work that instantly becomes a standard
in its field because it aggregates a vital collection of
records in one place, explains how those records
originally came to be, and, in
the process, promises to save
its users hours of toil. Earliest
Tennessee Land Records and Earliest
Tennessee Land History, by
Irene Griffey, is such a book.
The State of Tennessee was
established, essentially, from
land ceded to the federal government
by North Carolina.
Clouding the various land
cession laws that transferred
the title of land from North
Carolina to the United States south of the River Ohio
(a territory) and then to Tennessee was the requirement,
however vaguely defined, that North Carolina
Revolutionary soldiers’ promise of land for military
service be honored. Among other things, this requirement
resulted in the inclusion of hundreds of
footnotes to the Tennessee land laws that spelled out
the land transfer process. In the first portion of this
book, Mrs. Griffey has done an extraordinary job
of sifting through and organizing the legal history
of the early Tennessee land laws so that genealogists
may be able to grasp their substance. Among
other things, researchers can now understand when
and why the various county land offices were established,
the six-step process for obtaining a land
grant, the differences between military and other
types of land grants, and, of course, how to use early
Tennessee land records.
The bulk of this remarkable volume, however,
consists of abstracts of some 16,000 of the earliest
Tennessee land records in existence, arranged in
a tabular format. For each record we are given the
name of the claimant, the file number, the name of
the assignee (if any), the county, number of acres,
grant number, date, entry number, entry date, land
book and page number, and a description of the
stream nearest to the grant. A separate listing of assignees,
with the corresponding claimant and file
numbers follows in a separate table. The volume concludes
with a lengthy appendix consisting of maps
and a detailed chronology of Tennessee’s land statutes.
All of which makes Mrs. Griffey’s new book the
most important contribution to Tennessee genealogy
in recent memory.
Virginia
Families of Grace through
1900—Remembering Radford Volume I
By Joanne Spiers Moche; 2008; 5.5x8.5; 568 pp;
softbound. Order from the publisher at: Heritage
142 © Ev e r t o n’s Ge n e a l o g i c a l He l p e r Ja n ua ry/Fe b r u a r y 2009