The terminology and the process for obtaining title to land often causes
confusions for people who are using early Virginia records for the first
time.

The process went something like this: In order to obtain a piece of land
that no colonist yet claimed ownership of, you went out and found a
piece of land that you wanted, you hired  a licensed surveyor (during
the seventeenth century an agent of the surveyor general; during the
eighteenth from the county surveyor) to prepare a plat, or suvey, of the
land, you then filed a claim, including the survey, in the office of the
colonial secretary, paid a lot of fees to all of the surveyors and
clerks and others involved in the process, and eventually received a
patent. The patent bore the governor's signature and seal and
transferred title to the land from the Crown to the new owner, the new
owner being responsible before the Revolution for paying a quitrent to
the Crown as well as any other taxes levied in Virginia.

If the new owner did not "seat" the property within a certain amount of
time, the property reverted to the Crown or became fair game for the
next person who wanted to survey and own it. By "seating" the land was
usually meant cultivating a specified portion of it and erecting a
building of certain dimensions on it. This was intended to prevent
people from obtaining patents to vast tracts of land and holding on to
them for a long time until enough settlers were willing to pay high
prices for small portions of it. That intention was generally
frustrated, and some of the wealthiest Virginia families in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries acquired great landed estates in
that manner.

One of the ways in which people acquired land was through the so-called
"headright" system. This was in effect from the 1620s until the early
years of the eighteenth century. Any person who paid his or her own
passage to Virginia thereby became entitled to claim 50 acres of land;
and any person who paid for the passage of another person to Virginia
could claim 50 acres for each such person. The headright system was
intended to stimulate immigration into Virginia. Ship's captains and
merchants often acquired rights to large tracts of land in that manner.
The headrights were in fact documents certifying that the holder of the
document was entitled to go out and locate land and have it surveyed and
then go through the expensive and bothersome procedure of obtaining a
patent. The documents were often bought and sold, and therefore the
person who obtained the land might not have been the original person who
paid some person's passage. Sometimes quite a long time elapsed between
the issuance of a headright certificate and the actualy patenting of a
tract of land. Names of the headrights, that is names of the persons who
had their passages paid for them, often appear in the patent books.

A "caveat" is an objection that a person could file with the governor's
Council, in effect contesting another person's claim to a tract of land,
often on the basis that it had not been seated within the specified time
limit. Through a caveat a person might attempt to obtain a patent to a
tract of land that somebody else had already attempted to patent.

The grants from the colonial government were called patents. The grants
from the commonwealth (after July 1776) were called grants. Those
documents are all recorded in the Virginia land office, and for the
colonial period have been abstracted in the series of books called
Cavaliers and Pioneers. Images of the patent books are also available
under the Land Records section that can be found by clicking open the
site index in the left margin of the Library of Virginia's web site.

When a piece of land got sold from one owner to another, the transaction
was recorded in a deed that was supposed to be (and nearly always was)
recorded in the deed books by the clerk of the county in which the land
was situated.

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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