Where To Now?

Yesterday and today, we spent our time wandering Newberry and Spartanburg Counties in order to try to see where our folks lived. During a visit to the Newberry Library local history room, we came across a description of the Cappleman land in an equity filing that said it was along Cannon Creek. The 1810 and 1825 maps of the area each had a pinpoint that said Cappleman's Hill and Cappleman respectively. With those tidbits of information, we were able to deduce the present-day location of this land... which is currently under development to be the future home of First Baptist Church Newberry! We also visited the Newberry Museum, where we learned about the history of the area and looked through the exhibits to try to find names we recognized. The only one that caught my eye was Senn, the family who donated a large cupboard that was right beside the elevator. Elizabeth Senn was my 5th great grandmother, wife of Heinrich Boozer (their daughter married a Cappleman, and the lineage goes d...

How is it that a map can show a populated place called Cappleman in the vicinity of where you expect your Capplemans to be living, but there are no records of deeds in their name? Ah, a mystery. But I'm getting ahead of myself. A followup on yesterday's task: finding the current location of what was once Ulrich Boozer's land. Sadly, there are multiple industrial complexes currently on that land, including a power station. Soooo... we won't be able to stand on that little piece of ancestral land. Today's search took us to the South Carolina Department of Archives and History , where we dove into deed and will abstracts, then culled microfilms for scans of the original documents in their fullness. My goal was to locate the land of Francis Mason (my 4th great grandfather), and therefore that of his son James Mason as well. They moved to Spartanburg from Virginia after the Revolution, so they didn't have original land grants but rather purchased from those who did. ...