The full text of the Northern Neck land grants found in Beginning at a white Oak. Patents and Northern Neck Grants of Fairfax County, Virginia. (out of print for the foreseeable future) is now available as a searchable database through the White Oak project web site. I first placed this database online in 1998 and continue to work on it as time allows (not often). Not all surveyor's descriptions have been entered into the database. I have suspended entering descriptions or notes about families gleaned from Beginning at a White Oak because of concerns over copyrights to those "non-obvious" or "non-factual" elements. In future, the only notes added will be those researched by myself or contributed by others. To make up for this shortcoming I ask you the researcher and user of this site to help White Oak grow by contributing facts about grant properties or families. Together, we can build a wonderful resource for use by all researchers and genealogists.

What's in the Database?

Currently, the database contains 606 grants containing 208 surnames. The database only contains Northern Neck Grants from jurisdictions in what are now Fairfax, Arlington Counties, VA and the Town of Alexandria. Hundreds of grants were made in other counties and only a small fraction are abstracted here. In addition, the "crown grants" or patents have not been included yet, but are planned for the future. A very small number of surnames may not be searchable because they appear only as Additional Grantees.

The White Oak database is free for all to use. You may use the information about the grants in your own genealogy. It is derived from information collected by Beth Mitchell in her book Beginning at a White Oak. Patents and Northern Neck Grants of Fairfax County, Virginia. This book abstracts only the patents and grants for land that is now in the modern Fairfax and Arlington Counties, Virginia with the addition of the Town of Alexandria, Virginia. If you are looking for a grant made outside of these jurisdictions, you may wish to consult a volume by Gertrude Gray. All of the Northern Neck Proprietary grants have been abstracted and published by Gertrude Gray in a four volume set which is currently in print (Genealogical Publishing Company). No data from these volumes was used in preparation of this database.

Please keep in mind that when you search the White Oak database you have not searched everything relating to the Northern Neck, but only a corner!

Background

I did all the data entry for the White Oak database during a two month period in 1996 using Microsoft Access (and felt my first twinge of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in the process). I personally design, create and maintain the White Oak web pages, including style sheets and graphics, setup the MySQL database and programmed the PHP-based web application and Perl DBI interface that drive the dynamically created pages. If you see something here and it works, I did it. If it's broke, someone else did it. :)

This site when online in 1996 hosted on my City Gallery (est. Aug 1995) site and at my personal web page on whiteoak.home.att.net. In May 2000, the site was completely redesigned to improve appearance and usability. The focus on general genealogy was dropped in favor of concentrating on just the land grants and the property owners. In future, if I have time, I hope to expand the data and explore the concept of a "GNU Public License" for historical documents and data through the White Oak database.

I also help non-profit organizations and small businesses with technology in database and web programming. If you like what you see and want some work done, drop me a note by email.

---Steve Knoblock, editor@city-gallery.com