Cumberland County Deed Books online
I can hardly believe it, but it seems the Cumberland County Deed Books are online at Family Search! You need to create an account to access them, but the account is free. So if you have a Deed Book and page number, e.g Deed Book D, p. 315, you should be able to find the original online. The index is more cumbersome to use than the easy search at the Land Registry office, but is still workable. The indexes are organized year intervals and by grantor (the person selling the land or mortgaging a property) and by grantee. Wow, this is a game-changer for people who don't live in Nova Scotia. Happy searching!
Cumberland County Deed Books online
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Since, January, I have posted downloadable "deed trail" studies for 19 properties that lay along or near the Gmelin Line. These properties were located in Fenwick and Upper Nappan. Each of these properties changed hands many times. To make it easier to discover the names of possible ancestors who owned and/or lived on these properties, I have made a downloadable alphabetical index. Once you have located your ancestor, you can search for the corresponding downloadable deed study in previous blog posts dating back to January. Or you can view the entire collection in a DropBox Folder online here.
In 1823, Jeremiah Casey Sr. purchased 6 seventh-shares of 100-acre Lot 25 from James Shannon Morse, Hugh Logan, Amos Fowler, and Nathaniel Bliss. In 1839, Jeremiah gifted his son Daniel a half-share, the eastern side of the lot. Daniel mortgaged the property to his father-in-law James O'Brien, who later sold the property back to his widowed daughter Bridget Casey and his grandsons Amos and Thomas Casey. Bridget occupied the 12 acres north of Nappan Road, which later became the property of Renie Noiles and the Coates children. Amos and Thomas later sold the portion of the lot south of Nappan Road to James R. Lamy. In 1848, Jeremiah Casey Sr. divided the western half of the lot between his children Francis, Owen, and Nathaniel. Eventually Nathaniel owned all of the property, which he mortgaged to John D. Kinnear. Kinnear sold the northern 13 acres to George Gould but discharged the remainder of the mortgage. George Gould later sold his lot to Peter Gould. The remainder of the property south of Nappan Road was sold to Robert C. Noiles who, by then, owned the southern portion of Lot 14. That property was later purchased by Robert Bacon.
Amherst Township 100-acre lot 14 lay immediately east of the original Keiver homestead which occupied lots 15, 16, and 17. Lot 25 owned by Jeremiah Casey lay immediately to the east. Lot 14 lay south of the Denson Line which stretched from Cobequid Road to the Ox Bend of the Nappan River. The southern border of Lot 14 was formed by Amherst Township Lot 1, covered in previous posts about the homesteads of David Keiver and Samuel Embree on Lot 1. The Lime Stone Quarry on the east branch of Lime Kiln Brook was also located on Lot 14. Owners of Lot 14 included Patrick Porter, John Stuart, Charles Stuart, Edward Noiles Sr., his sons Josiah, George, Albert, and Robert C. Noiles, grandson James Wilson, Robert's son Frederick Noiles and his estranged wife Jane Gould, and various members of the Bacon family plus owners of the Lime Stone Quarry. The boundary between Lots 14 and 25 was obscured when Robert C. Noiles acquired a portion of the adjoining Lot 25 from Nathaniel Casey.
The 300-acre Amherst Township Lot 1 was originally drawn by David Downy and sold to John Stuart Sr. who sold the lot to Samuel Embree. This lot lay east of the extreme gore of the Samuel McCully Grant. David Keiver had purchased the northwestern portion and Samuel Embree's 65 acres made up the northeastern portion. This lot lay south of the east branch of Lime Kiln Brook. The lot was later sold to Francis Caleb Smith Jr. and passed to his son Floyd. The eastern boundary of the lot was a part of Lime Kiln Brook at an old French road leading to a sugar wood. The western boundary was near the limestone quarry on Lime Kiln Brook.
Samuel Holt purchased a 100-acre homestead south of Thomas Holt's from the DesBarres estate in 1865 and almost immediately divided it in two portions, east and west. He sold the eastern half, bordering on the Samuel McCully grant, to Alexander Lewis. The eastern half became the property of James McLaurin who had married Alexander Lewis's daughter Becky. The eastern half was later sold to Osborne Ripley. The western half later passed to Rufus Smith and then to Oman Lewis. Oman's wife sold the property to her brother William Henry Ripley who sold it to Jo Ed Ripley. The property was later acquired by the Higgs family.
The Thomas Holt homestead was another of the lots bounded on the east by the 1816 Samuel McCully Grant at the Gmelin Line. The lot lay south of the "twin" Bulmer and Squire Pipes lots and north of a lot owned by Samuel Holt. The relationship between Thomas and Samuel Holt is unknown. Thomas Holt died about 1871 and his widow Charlotte continued to live on the property. On the 1871 census widow Charlotte Holt was living on the property with her five daughters. The 1891 census lists Charlotte, daughters Augusta and Emily, and "Domestic" William Dale. By 1911, the 90 year-old-Charlotte was living in a household headed by William Dale, having sold the property to Dale in 1907.
The Stiles Homestead was another of the many homesteads located on the original homestead of Michael Keiver. The Stiles homestead was located south of the Gordon Bacon homestead on Nappan Road (#31 above), at the end of Lower Porter Road on the east side of the road (#29). George Allan Stiles first purchased a 35-acre portion of a lot allocated to Robert Pugsley and an adjacent 16 1/2-acre parcel allocated to Abba Mary Keiver. Allan Stiles passed the property to his son Allison, who acquired an additional 50 acres originally allocated to Abba Mary and Francis Keiver. After the death of his wife, Allison deeded the property and others to his son-in-law Albert Davis. The property was briefly owned by Harry Bacon and the Nova Scotia Land Settlement Board before it was acquired by Kenneth Smith.
While looking for Acadian genealogies on Family Search the other day, I stumbled upon the Harrison Family Papers which have been digitized and put online. Anyone remotely related to the Harrison Family will probably find something of interest there. The collection begins with a transcription of the Maccan, Nappan and Elysian Fields Township Records. The next section is a Harrison family genealogy compiled by William Harrison in the 1930's. Harrison also included genealogies and notes on families related to the Harrisons by marriage including Mills, Lewis, Lumley, Bent, Bacon, Black, Crane, Lovell, Allison, and Prescott. A third section contains a large number of original letters including the "famous" correspondence of Luke Harrison with his cousin and the letter from James Metcalf to his fiancee. Happy searching!
www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-C3SL-K76C-R?cat=174954 It turns out that my understanding of the events surrounding Henry Ripley's homestead purchase was just dead wrong. I had assumed that DesBarres's tenants wanted to purchase their properties and that DesBarres had resisted selling when it was just the opposite.
DesBarres's agent Mary Cannon had granted the tenants 990 year leases at a very favourable rate. The tenants very much wanted to maintain their leases and had banded together to share costs in defending them. DesBarres sued Henry Ripley in 1816 to break his lease but Henry prevailed in court. The court case affirmed the tenants' leases and their ability to sell their leases to others. This rendered the property virtually worthless to the landlord who was unable to eject the tenant or raise the rent. It's as if you had rented your first apartment and obtained a lease for $100 for 999 years. As the rents went up to $1000, $2000, you could sell your lease to someone else but the landlord could not raise your rent, eject you, or prohibit you from selling your lease. It seems that Henry Ripley, who had been targeted by DesBarres with a lawsuit, emerged as the ringleader when the tenants made common cause. However, DesBarres agent James S. Morse claims to have exerted his personal influence with Henry and persuaded him to make an offer to purchase his homestead. This must be taken with a grain of salt as Morse made this claim in the context of a lawsuit defending a huge bill he had sent to the DesBarres estate for his services. However, it does raise an interesting question. Were the tenants wise to purchase their properties or should they have tried to hold onto their leases? I've updated the DesBarres vs Tenants page of my website. |
AuthorHi there! My name is Mallory Burton and I started researching the Ripley family in 2011. I'd describe myself as a careful amateur who's more interested in story than names and dates. I hope you enjoy my website and blog. I also have a public Mallory/Ripley tree on Ancestry with over 4,000 names. To contact me, please comment on any one of my blog posts. Archives
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