RLP 282: Finding William Keaton’s Land

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 282, finding William Keaton’s Land. Welcome to Research Like, a Pro a genealogy podcast about taking your research to the next level. Hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder, A accredited Genealogist professional Diana and Nicole are the mother daughter team at family Locket dot com and the authors of Research Like, a pro A Genealogist guide with Robin Wirthlin. They also co-authored the Companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA, join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research, and solve difficult cases. Let’s go the sponsor of today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is newspapers.com, the largest online newspaper archive.

Nicole (50s):
Hi everyone. Welcome to research Like a Pro today.

Diana (52s):
Hi Nicole. how are you today?

Nicole (55s):
I’m so good. I’ve been learning a lot today about common law and legal language and resources for that, so it’s been a fun study

Diana (1m 3s):
That is fun and it’s just good to know the difference between common law and civil law. Most people don’t ever have to worry about civil law unless they’re researching in Louisiana and the United States or Spain or Mexico You know a different place. But that’s cool.

Nicole (1m 21s):
What about you?

Diana (1m 22s):
Well, I’m excited because I finished up my report on Clems Klein, so people who’ve been kind of following my progress there. And it was so fun because yesterday I was putting the final touches on it. I decided to just do a tiny bit more research. You know how that is where you were writing about something and then you had this idea in your head, you wanna just go check it. So just made a couple more connections. So just to bring everybody up to date on where I’m at here, I discovered that my John Klein that I was researching had died. He was a younger man. There’s a John C who’s older, a John Junior, never went by Junior, but he’s definitely younger.

Diana (2m 2s):
Anyway, I discovered he had died by 1849. And so my current hypothesis is that the three children who end up in Morgan County, Missouri with Mike Clems Klein, and her proposed brother Jacob Klein are the children of John who had died. And I had not put together that clumsy and Henderson Weatherford had left Arkansas in between 1848 and 1850. Their youngest child is born in 1848 in Arkansas, and then on the 1850 census they are in Missouri. This is exactly the timeframe when that death would’ve taken place. And so I’m thinking that those three children along with Mahala, who was age 22 and we think might be a younger sister of clumsy, they just all moved up together.

Diana (2m 52s):
You know I was thinking Mahala took these three children up and when I was reviewing my report, I realized no clumsy and Henderson were going, why wouldn’t they have all gone together? That makes so much more sense. So that’s my current hypothesis.

Nicole (3m 6s):
Oh great. That’s just one example of how writing helps you make connections.

Diana (3m 12s):
Yeah, we sometimes have to put on our creative hat and to think of all these different scenarios of what makes sense. And so I’m hoping when I work with the DNA that that will bear out all these hypotheses that I have from the actual records. So it’s been fun.

Nicole (3m 29s):
Great. Yeah, I’m working on finishing up my report too. And just like you said, after following my research plan, there were just a few more things that I felt like I needed to do based on what I found. It was interesting You know this particular James Dyer was poor. He didn’t own land, so his tax records always said just one white pole, no land. And so he wasn’t in any deeds. And I don’t really know where he died. I think he probably stayed in Granger County and there wasn’t any estate to distribute, so there wasn’t any record of that. And prior to 1850, I think he maybe came from Knox County and that’s a hypothesis that I can’t fully verify, but I eliminated all other people in 1840 as candidates.

Nicole (4m 11s):
So I think that’s him, but there wasn’t anything really else in Knox County either. He didn’t own land there. And so then I’m back to my original plan, which was to just sort out all of the different people in Granger County. There were so many dyers there. Surely one of them is related to him.

Diana (4m 29s):
Well, You know, I think sometimes just eliminating all the other candidates is a good scenario. It’s just You know. I wonder if there’s another candidate somewhere else that just has popped into the area.

Nicole (4m 40s):
Right. I just feel like I don’t want to leave all these loose ends in Granger County and I’ve got a lot of good deeds ready to look up. I extracted all of the page numbers and book numbers into my Airtable log and then I figured I would go look them up when I have time. So that’s kind of next on my list. And I. I don’t think that I will do all of that before I finish this report. I think, I think I’m ready to finish the report and put this into future research and then just kind of work on it over time and maybe write a second report. And there’s some records I want to order from the Tennessee State Library and Archives because not all the tax records were available online, so I really wanna just order those tax records prior to 1851.

Diana (5m 20s):
Yeah, I think it’s kind of tricky, isn’t it? Thinking about when you’re going to do your next research on, on this case or on any case, because often we’re all excited about it, but then we get started on something else and that’s really the value of these research reports because you may not pick this up again for a bit and then when you go back to it there you’ll be reminded of all of that you wanted to do. That’s gonna be exciting for you to keep working. Do you feel like we have so many projects I have feel like I have so many out there that I wanna keep working on? Oh yeah. Always a lot of research to do.

Nicole (5m 56s):
I do look forward to the next DNA study group starting in February because then we can pick up one of these other projects we’ve worked on. And I probably will just continue with the dire research and one of my goals is to sort out all the dyers in Granger County with the documentary records that I have now then with the DNA study group, work with the administrators of the DNA serving project for Dyers and see if I can sort out if any descendants of those Granger County Dyers have tested and are in that project.

Diana (6m 26s):
I wonder if you will find that their YDNA would all match or if maybe you have some branches of the family or not just separate Dyers, what do you think?

Nicole (6m 36s):
Well, when I’ve looked at the Dyer surname project before, there’s a lot of separate Dyer branches and it’s a pretty common surname. So my branch, there’s only two test takers who match each other for that branch. And so I would use the surname project to eliminate yeah, candidates because You know I know that we don’t match them.

Diana (6m 55s):
That would be excellent. That’s so interesting that that was a very common name. Are you fighting? That’s a common surname in a lot of places or just here in Tennessee?

Nicole (7m 5s):
It was also in North Carolina, but a lot in Tennessee. And that’s because there’s even a whole county named after Robert Henry Dyer. So there’s just a lot of dyers there.

Diana (7m 15s):
What is the ethnicity or the country of origin of the Dyer Series?

Nicole (7m 20s):
England, Scotland and Ireland.

Diana (7m 22s):
Interesting.

Nicole (7m 24s):
Alright, well for our announcements today, we are excited for our next Webinar in the Research Like, a Pro Webinar series. This month, December 19th, it’s featuring candy richer one of the researchers who has been one of our peer group leaders for the study group and she is going to be talking about a DNA case study called Proving the Mother of Cornelia Roberson Hickerson. So if you’d like to join us, she’ll be talking about proving a biological relationship and using DNA from start to finish. And this is about a family living in Tennessee in Texas and migrating to Texas in 1872. So this should be great. Like we mentioned, the next Research Like, a Pro with DNA study group begins February, 2024.

Nicole (8m 6s):
So we’re looking forward to working with a lot of you on A DNA project and we’re excited to work on our own research and talk about that. So sign up starting in December to be a peer group leader. You can get free registration and you would just have to help lead a Zoom meeting with a small group every Monday. We hope we will see you at Roots Tech. And that is from February 29th to March 2nd. It’s a three day conference and you can register for $109.

Diana (8m 36s):
Well great. I am looking forward to the DNA study group and buckling down on DNA. That will be so fun. Well, today we’re talking about finding William Keaton’s land, A Visit to the South Carolina Department of Archives and History And I. Think we all have that goal of discovering the location of our Ancestors land. Sometimes we can pinpoint the exact spot and go and stand on the land and look around, see the mountains, the hills, the valleys, whatever’s there, officials completely flat. And just imagine what it was like for them coming into this area or if they grew up there, You know working the land, things that they would have been doing. It can be a little challenging, however, to figure out that land.

Diana (9m 21s):
So we have some good clues with land records. We have land grants or land patents. We have deeds and those are all things that can reveal the exact location. Now, as everybody listening knows, my paternal lines are out of the south, but I grew up in the west. I grew up in Idaho and my dad was in his younger years, I don’t know, maybe about eight. They had moved from Oklahoma, Texas area out to California and then we never went back south and his Ancestors were even further south. You know, north Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, all those fun southern states.

Diana (10m 1s):
And so when I was able to go to South Carolina this summer, summer of 2023, I was speaking at the South Carolina Genealogical Society workshop, which takes place at the archives there. And so it was my first chance to go to that archive. And I was excited to take one afternoon and go do some research. So I was trying to think of which ancestor would be fun to research. And I remembered that we have William Keaton who you discovered Nicole, my fourth great-grandfather and your fifth great-grandfather. And he resided in Pendleton District South Carolina, which became Anderson district in 1826.

Diana (10m 44s):
So I decided to see if there was something I could find there at the archives about William Keaton.

Nicole (10m 50s):
I love talking about William Keaton and it was so exciting for me when I kind of first started using the Research Like a Pro process to figure out the answer to that question I had, which was who was Lucinda Welch’s father? And I studied her life, figured out that her daughter had a death certificate that dated her maiden name. And at first I thought it said Keston, Remember that? And it was kind of hard to read. But when I really examined the handwriting of the person writing the death certificate, I realized that the way he wrote his A was the same in female and in Keaton. So I figured out that it wasn’t Keston, but that it was Keaton. And I had been a little bit stuck looking for Keston because that wasn’t really an actual surname that existed in South Carolina.

Nicole (11m 36s):
So when I found it was Keaton, then I found some Keaton’s living in the exact county where I had found a marriage of one of Lucinda Keaton’s older daughters. So that was exciting to have a place and a surname and to figure out that William Keaton was the best candidate and then then finding his estate record, which named all of his heirs. Well, that’s cool that you had decided to go and visit the South Carolina archives. William Keaton first appears in the records in a land grant in Pendleton County 96 district in 1792. And jurisdictions are a bit confusing in South Carolina for this era because they had overarching districts and within those districts there were several counties and so that was different than other states.

Nicole (12m 24s):
In 1800, the districts were abolished and many of the districts became counties. In 1826, Pendleton County was dissolved and became Anderson County. So the place to look was Anderson County. Having the exact location of William Keaton’s land is very helpful in discovering which jurisdiction his records might fall in. So we knew that his land was in the Anderson county of more modern eras, and looking at the map helps us figure that out. So you can see in a map of South Carolina districts and counties from 1791 to 1799 that within that area is the approximate location of William Keaton’s land.

Nicole (13m 6s):
And Diana had taken a star and put that on the map to see where it would’ve been. And she found that approximate location of William Keaton’s land as described in the land grant. And the land grant said that he had a 577 acres surveyed on the 13th of October, situated in the District of 96 in Pendleton County on Camp Creek and branches of Buckhorn Waters of Savannah River, bounded by lines running northwest and northeast by John Grisham’s land all other sides by old surveys and vacant. That’s fun to see the last name Grisham because that’s actually the surname of his wife, Catherine, Katie Grisham.

Nicole (13m 48s):
That was something that I found in a newspaper article that was written by one of their descendants, kind of in a family history. So I don’t know the original information where that came from about the marriage, but it was printed in a early 19 hundreds newspaper, so somebody knew that. Anyways, this land grant was signed by Charles Pinckney, the governor on October 1st, 1792 and certified by Peter Breman, surveyor General on September 19th, 1792. The Grant states Pendleton County 96 district, but the map shows the land on the southern border of Pendleton County, which was in the Washington district. So we don’t know, maybe the surveyor incorrectly identified the district or the district.

Nicole (14m 28s):
Boundaries were difficult to determine when the land was located on the border. Maybe some was in part of one district and some in the other district,

Diana (14m 36s):
Right? We look at these maps and they have distinct borderlines, but if you can imagine you’re out surveying the land. There’s no borderline imposed upon the land. So it would be very tricky if you were on a border to know which side you were on for the record keeping. So our maps are so valuable when we are doing our research. Well, let’s have a word from our sponsor, newspapers.com. newspapers.com is your ultimate resource for discovering your family’s history. Explore more than 800 million newspaper pages in their vast collection spanning three centuries. newspapers.com is your gateway to exploring the past with papers from the us, uk, Canada, Australia, and beyond.

Diana (15m 18s):
Trace your family’s journey and uncover the extraordinary tales of your Ancestors through newspaper stories, birth and marriage announcements, obituaries, photos, and much more. For listeners of today’s show, newspapers.com is extending a discount of 20% off on a publisher, extra subscription. Just use the code family Locket at checkout. Don’t miss that on this incredible opportunity. Well, that 557 acre grant to William Keaton came with a land Platt map that shows the boundaries. And as you mentioned before, one of the neighbors that caught my eye was John Grisham. And also that map shows the location of the camp and Buckhorn Creeks that were mentioned in the land Grant.

Diana (16m 5s):
And, I love these old survey maps. They have the degrees and the directions like northeast and southwest. And this one has, let’s see, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 sides. So it’s not kind of looks like a Pentagon, but then it’s got this little extra piece cut in and it’s just so fun to look at. And imagine this land that’s a lot of acreage, 557 acres my dad owned about that much land in Idaho and it’s a big piece of land, so that’s so cool. Well, under the Platt map there’s a notice written, and this is by the surveyor, and he says, I certify for William Keaton attractive land containing 557 acres surveyed for him the 13th of October, 1791, situated in the District of 96 and Pendleton County on Camp Creek and branches of Buckhorn of Savannah River and have such buddings and bounding as the above Platt represents.

Diana (17m 7s):
So You know it’s really neat when you can find a Platt map for a parcel of land because it does help you put into context where this land is. And when we saw the Camp Creek and Buckhorn locations, it gave a good idea of where that land plot lay. And there in the archives I was working with the archivist and he took me over to these great big maps. It was a historical map of Pendleton County and everything was very large so you could see all the creeks, all the small little markings that would’ve been in these land surveys. And I’ve got a pretty good idea of where the land would have been.

Diana (17m 47s):
And so on the blog post, I took a picture of this map and put my red star right where I thought it would be. So if I wanted to travel there, I’d probably be able to find a pretty close You know match of where the willing Keaton land was. So it was really helpful to have those neat land maps there at the archives. But we have so many maps online as well that I don’t think you have to be in person anymore. You can find things online. And in fact, I did find the map online at the Library of Congress, so that was awesome. Cool.

Nicole (18m 25s):
I had found a map of Pendleton district in the David Rumsey Map collection and it was a lot like this one you had found at the South Carolina archives where you could zoom in really close and see all the creeks. And so it was really cool to see the map that you found and the one that I had used in comparison.

Diana (18m 45s):
It’s fun. Well, and this map also shows some mills like has John Thompson’s mill and some tavern. I mean this is really detailed. It’s really neat. These old maps are awesome.

Nicole (18m 58s):
They are. They’re so helpful. Well the South Carolina Department of Archives and history website gives a really good summary of the process by which the state granted land after the revolution. So when the British evacuated South Carolina, and this was in 1783, the state was left in need of funding. They needed to rebuild after all the the war years. And so like other states, unclaimed land was abundant and by selling it, the state government could not only settle the state’s debts but refill its coffers. So in 1784 South Carolina passed an act for establishing the mode and conditions of surveying and granting the vacant lands within the state.

Nicole (19m 43s):
So initially a grantee was to pay $10 per a hundred acres, which sounds like a pretty good deal. But then in 1791 the price was dropped to cover just the filling and surveying fees. So William Keaton took advantage of this law and had the 557 acres on the southern edge of Pendleton district surveyed with access to two creeks. This would’ve been a great location for his land.

Diana (20m 7s):
It’s interesting that they had to drop the fee from $10 per hundred acres, but I have been reading the book by Richard Bushman, which is about the American farmer. And then the period I’m in right now is the period of the revolution and just after it, and people were absolutely destitute, they had no money because trade had been cut off during those years and they couldn’t sell their goods. They had no cash, they still had produce and things that they had grown and could trade for, but this actual idea of cash to go pay for something like land, they just didn’t have money. And so that’s a tricky time and I’m sure that was part of the reason they had to drop the price because they wanted to get some money in.

Diana (20m 55s):
And so I think that’s kind of fun to put a little bit of history with this law and understanding what was going on at the time. Yes, well, keeping the records, we are always so concerned and rightly so with how to find the records and understanding how they were created and stored helps us locate them and use them. So how were these land records created? Well, under the 1784 law, a commissioner of location was appointed for each district. And when an individual located land they wanted to survey, they would first obtain a survey warrant from the commissioner, then have the land surveyed by the deputy surveyor and he would create a scaled drawing or Platt map using meets and bounds and this form of land measurement used degrees and landmarks.

Diana (21m 48s):
So just as I described a little bit with that Platt map before William Keaton, the landmarks were the two creeks and the drawing shows the various calculations used to measure out the 557 acres. Well the commissioner of location then recorded the surveyed Platt in his Platt book and sent the original Platt to the state surveyor general in Charleston. He also recorded it in a Platt book and said it to the Secretary of State who prepared the land grant for the governor to sign. And another copy of the Platt was made and attached to the grant which the grantee received. So three different copies of that. The plant and grant given to the grantee may have been passed down through the family, but often was lost.

Diana (22m 31s):
And I don’t have any original grants from any of these Ancestors. I would love to see one if someone had one, but I fear that many of those are lost. We luckily have the copies though that were kept in the surveyor General and Secretary of State’s office. So I think this is why we have so many of these original land grants available to us, not just in South Carolina but other states. Because of the importance of land, they would make copies and in multiple places the South Carolina Department of Archives and history does details some limitations to the Platts and it’s always good to know our limitations. And they say that a few of the Platts are from before the revolution and represent lands that have been planted but not granted when the war broke out in 1775.

Diana (23m 21s):
Some others don’t really include un granted lands, but are for grants designed to declare it murky or defective. Titles plots often overlap or have gaps between them. So you should not expect they will fit together exactly like a puzzle would. These Platts are not part of an overall grid planty, platting scheme. Like you may see in states farther west, each Platt was drawn independently using markers like trees, stumps and rocks as boundaries. So I love that description of limitations because I think sometimes we do want to fit those together like a puzzle. And I know some of the deeded mapping software. Does that And I know you’ve worked a little bit with that in a Nicole?

Diana (24m 1s):
Have you seen that? That sometimes there are gaps or overlaps with the Platts?

Nicole (24m 5s):
Yeah, You know I was trying really hard to fit all the deeds together like a puzzle. And there were some that you could really line up just perfectly and the the borders fit together and there were others where there was something missing or You know, there was like an error in the land description. So you could sometimes figure out the error and like reverse it and make it look right, like it had the wrong direction or something. But yeah, it was pretty interesting to do that project because I think I mapped like 50 deeds and just seeing the evolution of the land over time. And I wanted to see if John West got his land from a relative or someone, but it looks like he just got it from his father-in-Law, which I had kind of hypothesized, so that was interesting.

Nicole (24m 51s):
But yeah, it’s definitely not like the federal land states,

Diana (24m 55s):
Right, which have the squares rectangles absolutely set in stone there, how those are laid out. So these are quite a bit different. These plats that are surveyed with meets and bounds And I think it’s really interesting how the war impacted everything, which of course it would. People had land surveyed, but then the war broke out and they couldn’t get it granted. And then after that maybe they started living on it. We see that in a lot of areas where people are living on the land before they actually own it or have any right to it. And so you have some challenges with who, who actually owns this land or who’s going to have title to it. So just like it is today, some contention can arise from land.

Nicole (25m 38s):
Absolutely. Well the South Carolina Department of Archives and history has digitized a lot of these records and they’re available via their online records index and their search engine allows you to search by name, location, or date. When you locate the record for your ancestor, be sure to download the image to your own files and create an entry in your timeline or research log. There you can put in the citation and the record details because we were sure that this land grant applied to our ancestor William Keaton. It was added to the timeline for him. But if you are unsure if a record applies to your ancestor, you can still record it and put it in your research log with a note to Discover if there was another person of the same name that the grant could have been for a good clue to connect.

Nicole (26m 26s):
William Keaton to the land was the neighbor John Gresham researching William had found his wife to be Katie Gresham, who had a brother named John. Further research can now explore John and solidify this connection and finding the Land Platt Map and location of William Keaton’s land was another piece of the puzzle that we’re putting together for his life and family. And I hope that we can sometime figure out if he was one of the Revolutionary War soldiers or not. ’cause there were several William Keaton’s that I have seen out there. And I Hope to someday be able to figure out which one is which. And then of course it would be so fun to go back to South Carolina and stand on the land that William Keaton received through this grant and where they lived and who doesn’t want to stand on the land where their Ancestors lived.

Nicole (27m 13s):
It’s such an interesting and fun goal.

Diana (27m 16s):
I agree. So we’ll definitely have to do that trip to South Carolina me for the second time and you for the first time and go find the Keaton land. We have some other South Carolina Ancestors. While I was at the archives, I wish I would’ve looked up some information about John Royston who was there for about 10 years. But You know there’s always a second trip back or a third trip back to these archives and maybe they’ll continue getting things digitized and it will be available online sometime. So that’s always exciting to think about.

Nicole (27m 47s):
It is. It’s wonderful to see so many libraries and archives working on these digitization projects.

Diana (27m 52s):
It really is a wonderful boon for us as Genealogists. It’s fun to be on site researching, but it’s so nice to not always have to go on site because that that’s a little more difficult for us.

Nicole (28m 4s):
Yeah. And your time is just restricted when you’re there. You can’t always get everything you want to.

Diana (28m 8s):
Right. If you ever had the chance to go to Columbia South Carolina, make sure you go by the archives. It’s just a beautiful building. And the archivists there are so incredibly helpful. I’ve never been to an archive where the archivists weren’t helpful. They’re always so thrilled to have people come in and especially if you have a real research goal, You know what you’re looking for and then they’re so helpful. I was going to mention when we were talking back about the different districts and the county boundary changes, they have these huge binders that they pull out for your county or district, and it was just neat to see how they’ve organized that and it basically tells you all the different records that they have. So it’s just fascinating to think about all this stuff in these archives and organized and available for us to go research.

Nicole (28m 56s):
Yay. All right. Well that was fun talking about that today. And we hope you are all able to do some research about your Ancestors and their original land grants in South Carolina or one of the other original colonies that became states. Well, we hope you have a great week and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Diana (29m 15s):
All. Bye-Bye everyone.

Nicole (29m 16s):
Bye. Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like, a Pro and Research Like a Pro at DA on amazon.com and other books sellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at family Locket dot com slash services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday. Subscribe to our newsletter at family Locket dot com slash newsletter. Please Subscribe rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.