Series 1156: Jackson Court House District Land Records. 1820-1847.
Secretary of State (RG 28). Public Lands Division.

Series 1156: Jackson Court House District Land Records. 1820-1847.
Secretary of State (RG 28). Public Lands Division.

Records of private land claims made in the Jackson Court House land office district, which comprised all or part of the following present-day Mississippi counties: Jackson, Harrison, Hancock, Pearl River, Stone, George, Forrest, and Perry. The district also included a strip of land about ten miles wide in what is now Alabama. Most of the claims are situated on the banks of the Pascagoula River, Mississippi's Gulf Coast, and the east bank of the Pearl River. The records include warrants of survey, certificates of confirmation, certificates of survey, plats, transcripts from the Register of Certificates, and a list of private land claims recommended for confirmation. Many entries in the transcripts from the Register of Certificates concern private land claims in the town of Mobile.

The records in this series related to individual claims are boxed by document size and then alphabetically by names of individuals who made the claims. See the lists which follow the Historical Note in order to identify the box containing information about an individual claimant.

See also:

Series 618: Private Land Claims Research Material. 1984.
Series 1155: East of Pearl River District Land Records. 1809-1821, n.d.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new land that was opened up for settlement was first surveyed to establish major township and range lines. This work was carried out under the orders of the General Land Office in Washington, D.C. Local land offices were set up, and each land office was responsible for surveying lands and keeping the appropriate records in its assigned land district. The local land offices operated with clerks and two officials, the Register and the Receiver. The Register took land applications from settlers, made notations in the tract and plat books, and produced monthly reports. The Receiver took payments for the land, and he also produced monthly reports. Unclaimed land, called the "public domain," was considered the property of the Federal Government until it was sold at public auction.

In 1819 a land office was established at the Jackson [County] Court House, the exact site of which is unknown today. In 1822, the land office of the Jackson Court House District was moved to Augusta. The land office officials of this district were faced with the problem of disentangling the many private land claims in the area, which had to be established before the public domain lands could be identified and sold. Some of the land had been settled long before the United States existed as an independent nation, and many of its inhabitants held land claims from the French, British or Spanish governments.

France had held the area from 1699 until 1763, when it was ceded to Great Britain and became part of British West Florida. During the American Revolution, with Britain's attention turned elsewhere, Spain invaded British Florida in 1779 and conquered it within two years. The northern border of Spanish West Florida was set at the 31st parallel. Thus, the entire Mississippi Gulf Coast for about forty miles inland was under Spanish control until 1810, when it was annexed by the United States. The area that would later comprise the Jackson Court House land district was officially added to the Mississippi Territory in 1812, with the exception of Mobile. Mobile was added in 1813.

The policy of the United States was to honor land claims granted by former governments in its newly acquired territory, if the legitimacy of such claims could be confirmed. Land claims could also be confirmed simply "by virtue of inhabitation and cultivation." Such confirmations, called "pre-emptions," were necessary, since a great number of the inhabitants were actually squatters who had no legal claim to their land other than that they had lived on it and cultivated it for a number of years. Some of these squatters had occupied the land before it was annexed by the U.S. in 1810, and some had come later.

Officials called Commissioners were appointed to deal with private claims of land. Their job was to sort out the legitimate land claims from the fraudulent ones and to make sure that settlers who held their lands from previous governments were treated fairly. They would establish themselves near the local land office, advertise their presence, and all with private land claims could seek out the Commissioners to have their claims confirmed. Typically, the Register acted together with two other appointed or ex-officio commissioners as a Board of Commissioners to disentangle and judge conflicting land claims. The claims usually resulted in the creation of three documents: warrants of survey (instructions to the deputy principal surveyor to survey or have surveyed a particular piece of land); certificates of confirmation (which state that the individual's claim is valid and that he or she is entitled to a patent); and certificates of survey (which usually include a plat of the tract of land, and certify that the land has indeed been surveyed by the proper authorities).

A note about land measurements: Though most land measurements in these records were made in acres, a fair number of claims were made in arpents, a French unit of measure. One arpent is roughly equivalent to 0.85 acre. The word is usually spelled arpens or arpins in these documents.

Cain, Cyril Edward. Four Centuries on the Pascagoula. 2 vols. State College, Miss. (?), 1962; Spartanburg, S. C.: The Reprint Company, 1983

Galloway, Patricia. "Private Land Claims in Mississippi: A Documentary Essay including Informal Headnotes on Archival Series." Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1984.

Long, John H., ed. Mississippi Atlas of Historical County Boundaries. Compiled by Peggy Tuck Sinko. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

Rohrbough, Malcolm J. The Land Office Business: the Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789-1837. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1990.

White, C. Albert. A History of the Rectangular Survey System. Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, n. d.

Below is a list of names of individuals who are represented in these records and the identification numbers of boxes in which their records are contained. Please be aware that names on the list are spelled exactly as they appear in the documents; this does not mean that they are spelled correctly. Many of the French names have been somewhat anglicized, as well. If the spelling of an individual's name is inconsistent within the document(s), variant spellings have been noted in parentheses. A question mark (?) denotes uncertainty of spelling due to indecipherable handwriting.