Earl's booklet overviews each township by acreage, bounding
municipalities, number of grist mills, steam mills, water saw mills,
tanneries, distilleries, post offices, villages, plank roads, streams,
etc. But the bulk of this publication is devoted
to an attempt to
identify the owner or occupant of every lot on every concession in every
township, "as far as can be accurately ascertained."
Although we cannot prove it is true, the names on the
Tremaine map and the names in Earl's Sketch dovetail so
consistently, we assume they had a common source. By a very narrow
margin, there appears to be more complete information on the map.
The first gotchya of either the map or Sketch is the missing surname
index. Unless you know the precise Lot, Concession and Township your
ancestors worked, finding them in Earl's Sketch or on Tremaine's
1856 map, could take many hours.
So we are creating that missing surname index here -- and for
your convenience, merging it into our still growing B-M-D Etc. Index,
among entries about the same people and families culled from other sources.
The second gotchya of these resources is their
inconsistent spelling of surnames. Is it Voight, Voigt or Voit? Reavely
or Reavly? Bowlby or Bowlsby? Or are
these unrelated people? As with other resources, we've added pointers to
alternative spellings within our index when we had reason to do so.
By the 1850s many of the granted 200 acre lots had been subdivided, so
multiple names appear on many lots. No relationship between these
neighbors should be assumed.
Our indexing of these resources began in late Apr 2009.
Progress to date is listed below:
