After the Revolutionary War ended, many soldiers that served in the war were awarded bounty grants, either on a federal or state level.
This was land in exchange for military service.
These records can be found in the state archives or National Archives.
This is a great way to discover if an ancestor may have served in the Revolutionary War, if other records are unavailable.
This also gives a glimpse of why an ancestor may have moved or to trace their movements through the records.
Not all of the men who received a land bounty moved.
- Many men sold their land to others.
- The land may have also been given to a son, son-in-law or grandson upon coming of age
- The land may have been ignored
- The ancestor may have scouted it out and determined it was not for him or his family
I had an ancestor who served in North Carolina and was awarded land in western Tennessee. Only in the last year of his life did he move to the property he had been awarded over fifty years earlier through a land grant.
The ancestor would have based his decision on many things, but he was moving into the wild and unknown. He would have to cultivate his own land, cut down trees, cut roads, build structures and may have been an early settler to the earlier.
Have you traced an ancestor through land grants?