Tools – Page 3 – A Pennsylvania Dutch Genealogy

Lancaster Deed Book Index

Kris Hocker on 28 Jun 2010

I’ve written about how much I love deeds—and the great information you can find in them—and I’ve written about how great it is to find the Lancaster County Deed books viewable online. One thing that’s not so great is not having a deed index online, too.

I’m working on changing that! I’ve been going through the books and creating an index that I hope to share through my site. It started out containing the information found in the Grantor and Grantee indices that were created in book form—the standard grantor information, grantee information, book, volume, page number, deed date, date recorded, and location or type of record (mortgage, quitclaim, etc.) All the necessary information to find the deed you’re looking for.

But then I started thinking about what would be included in my ideal index. Here are some of the ideas I came up with:

Image Frame Number
The page number and frame number don’t correspond—and can be quite off—and the page numbers can sometimes be impossible to read.
Grantor/Grantee Location
Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between multiple men of the same name without a residence or occupation.
Spouse Name
For land sales, sometimes the wife is named. This also helps to identify the grantor among men of the same name.
Neighbors
Often deeds refer to the owners of adjoining property. This might help to locate an individual where others records don’t exist or can’t be found.
Others Named
There are also other people associated with a deed: witnesses, previous owners, family members when a deed is part of an estate settlement, etc. This may help to locate people who otherwise wouldn’t be found, especially where an earlier deed wasn’t recorded.

What would you like to see in your ideal deed index? Drop me a line or leave a comment and let me know. You just might see it in the final product!

Don’t Forget Deeds!

Kris Hocker on 6 May 2010

Have I mentioned I love deeds? Well, even if I have, it bears repeating. I LOVE deeds! As I’ve mentioned before I’m gathering information on the Hoover/Huber families of Lancaster County. I’m currently reviewing deed records for these families and abstracting them with the ultimate goal of creating a volume of Lancaster County Huber/Hoover family data.

You wouldn’t believe the amount of information in some of these deeds. True enough, some of the deeds are simply—so & so Hoover sold or bought from so & so x amount of land in xyz township, bounded as follows… But some of the deeds list the land transactions for that piece of property back to the original grant from the Proprietaries of Pennsylvania, including references to the original patent (patent book, volume & page) and other deed transactions. They also name each owner and their wife and sometimes—as land was often transferred through families—children and their spouses. I’ve even come across deeds created during an estate settlement that include verbatim extractions from the will itself.

As I’ve been going through the deeds I’ve been keeping a list of persons and their locations, including their heirs as taken from the deed, and trying to make connections between persons. For some reason, I’ve become stuck for the moment on Christian Huber/Hoober/Hoover of Hempfield Township. One deed listed his heirs:¹

Martin Hoover of Hempfield Township, wife Catharine
Jacob Hoover of Brecknock Township, wife Anna
Elizabeth (Hoover) Funk of Manor Township, husband Henry
John Hoover of Hempfield Township
Barbara Hoover
Magdalena Hoover
Anna Hoover
Michael Hoover
Christian Hoover Jr.

Later deeds reveal that Barbara Hoover married Christian Hoffman bet 1758 and 1764, Magdalena Hoover married John Hershey bet 1758 and 1767, and Anna Hoover married John Bossler (also Bassler, Basler, Bausler) between 1758 and 1769.² Michael and Christian Hoover Jr. both died after their father in their minority without issue. Other deeds showed that John Hoover married Anna (possibly Hershey) and was a miller. He was also likely the John Hoover Esq. who was the executor of the estate of Johannes Hoover of Manheim Township.³

John Hoover Esq. and his wife Anna, according to his will, had children:

Elizabeth Hoover, wife of Peter Baughman (also Bachman, Bauchman)
Christian Hoover
Mary Hoover, wife of Jacob Stehman

Another daughter, Ann Hoover wife of Christian Stehman, although not named in the will abstract, is named in a deed where the heirs sign a release for property in Manheim Township that John left his daughter Elizabeth and her husband Peter Baughman.⁴ If I’d hadn’t found this deed, I wouldn’t have known about Ann.

I’ve also had success tracing Peter Baughman’s ancestry and other relatives through deeds. His brother Christian died without issue and there are deeds that name his siblings, some of their children, and in a couple of cases grandchildren. Deeds also provided the name of the son-in-law of Peter’s sister Ann (Baughman) Bear. Want to guess? Ann’s daughter Catharine married a Christian Huber. Think there’s a connection back to Christian Hoover of Hempfield? I don’t know, but maybe the deeds will tell us…

So, don’t discount deeds. They can be a veritable gold mine of information, especially when use in conjunction with other sources. Have you learned something valuable by researching deeds? Please share.

Huber/Hoover Map of Lancaster County, PA

Kris Hocker on 21 Apr 2010

Lancaster County Huber/Hoover land warrant tracts

I’m in the middle project on the Huber/Hoover family, specifically looking at Lancaster County and Fayette County, Pennsylvania and Washington County, Maryland—with the likelihood of branching out to additional areas like Somerset County, Bedford County, Franklin County, Dauphin County… A big undertaking!

I’ve started by looking at deeds and land warrants for Lancaster County. Being a visual person, I wanted some way of seeing spatial relationship between the locations from these records. I tried combining data from the warrantee township maps, but decided to try a simpler approach.

I put together a map of the original townships of Lancaster County that were within its current boundaries. Lancaster originally included much more land, including parts of Dauphin, Lebanon, Berks, Cumberland, York, Adams and Franklin counties. For my purposes I wanted to focus on a smaller area. On this map I plotted the approximate locations of Huber/Hoover tracts from the land warrants prior to 1800.

I can’t guarantee that I’ve got everyone correct. John Jacob and Jacob Huber in Conestoga (now Pequea) could have been the same man. The two tracts adjoin. Since the patents were for John Jacob Huber (from Martin Kendig, 1736) and Jacob Huber (from John Smith, 1759), I indicated them separately.

Also, I haven’t determined if all the tracts in Warwick and Manheim Townships were to the same Jacob Huber. Jacob Huber (ca 1708-1767), the founder and ironmaster of Elizabeth Furnace, did own substantial amounts of property. So, it is likely the same man.

I must caution that proximity does NOT necessarily always indicate a relationship. According to Harry Hoover’s book on the descendants of Hans Hoober of Earl Township, Hans’ son Jacob owned property in Martic Township—he was likely the John Jacob Huber—quite a ways away from his father’s land. Hans and Martin of Earl Township are, however, grandfather and grandson.

Pennsylvania Genealogical County Map

Kris Hocker on 17 Feb 2010

If you do genealogy, then you’ve got to love maps. Maps can help get you oriented, organized and straightened out when the research—and all the little bits of data you’ve collected—gets confusing. Say you find records under the same name, but in different townships. A map can help you to decide whether the records are likely to be for one man or more than one man.

What always trips me up, however, is that maps don’t stay the same over time. Records for one location may be in a different township or county—or even state—years or decades earlier or later. For instance, John² Hoover’s (Andrew¹) property in Greene County was originally part of land claimed by Virginia, so documentation can be found in Monongalia County, now West Virginia. But after Virginia and Pennsylvania settled their claims, part of John’s land was in Westmoreland County then Washington County, where the copied survey can be found, and finally Greene County.

Genealogical Map of the Pennsylvania Counties

What I love about the Genealogical Map of the Pennsylvania Counties from the Pennsylvania Land Office is that it shows the counties over time. You can see when certain parts of the Commonwealth were purchased. It also tells you when each county was created. For instance, the Fayette County area was part of land purchased in 1768. But Fayette County wasn’t created until 1783. It also shows you that Fayette was originally part of Cumberland County (#6), then Westmoreland County (#11).

The full map also includes little vignettes that show the counties for specific years. You can see how the jurisdictional landscape changed through the years. It also includes information on each of the 33 land purchases from 1682 through 1792 that established the boundaries of the state of Pennsylvania.

You should check out this valuable resource at the Pennsylvania State Archives website. And while you’re there, check out their other fantastic map resources!

Update 11/2012: If you would like a copy of this map, you can purchase it at the Pennsylvania State Bookstore – shoppaheritage.com. It’s a bargain at $2.00 for an 11×17 poster. The downloadable PDF is NOT printable.

Census Checklist

Kris Hocker on 13 Feb 2010

If you’re a fan of Ancestry.com on FaceBook, you may have seen the postings about creating a census checklist to track your ancestors through the census records. Since people have been sharing theirs, I thought I’d share, too.

I don’t know if you’ve found this to be true in your family (bet you have!), but it seems my ancestors and their brothers used the same given names for their children over and over and… This can create problems when you’re looking in source records—how to do know which John or George or Adam the record pertains to? It’s particularly confusing in early census records—pre 1850—when you only have the location, head of household, and an age range with which to work. Tax records were giving me headaches, too.

So, I used a spreadsheet to make a chart that shows me what years to expect to see records for a given individual.

Tracking record availability by year and age

Tracking expected record availability by year and age

As you can see, this chart includes more than just the years for US Federal census enumerations. I’ve also included years in which I’ve found records for tax assessments and returns across the top. Names for the people I’m researching appear down the left side. It’s a two-generation chart, so the name in bold is the father of those indented beneath.

I included the year in which each individual turned 18. I’ve never been sure when they became eligible to be taxed—at age 18 or 21—so, to be safe, I’ve used 18. If I know the year that an individual married, I will put an “M” in that cell. This helps because sometimes, unlike today, a person won’t be found as a head of household if they haven’t married and set-up their own household. Instead, they would have continued on as a member of their parents’ or other relatives’ household, or if they got work with another family, as part of that household. I also try to include the year each person died, with a “D”, so that I know when I can expect them to stop appearing in the records. The dark blue shows the years I expected to locate records for the fathers, starting at eighteen. The bright blue shows the childhood of the sons with the years after the age of 18 in a lighter, grey-purple.

Adam and Martin Hocker both lived in Derry Township, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. They both had sons they named John, George and Jacob. Frederick Hacker’s son, George (1808), also lived in the same area in Dauphin County for a time, creating more confusion. Additionally, there were an Adam and John Hocker in Derry Township that I’m sure are members of the family, but I haven’t been able to tie them in, yet. This document—plus marriage information—helped me to straighten out some of my confusion regarding tax and census records and attribute them to the appropriate person.

What tools have you found or created to help you during your family research?

Category: Tools