Eureka!

Well, it's been a while but I finally found something new to blog about. After taking a break from genealogy for several months, I recently got back to working on my family history book. For the past week or two I've been researching farm life. The second chapter of my book is about James Hickey's time as a farm laborer on the farm of John Fox (who would later become his father-in-law). I wanted to have an idea of what life was like for James and his future in-laws.

I was able to find quite a bit of information about farming in Maryland in 1850, but I also wanted to know more about the setting of John Fox's farm (the layout of the land, etc.). To do that, I needed to know where the farm was located.

A few years ago I had found an entry from 1843, in the Baltimore County land records, which detailed John's original purchase of over 200 acres. I knew the property was located near Perry Hall, just south of the Gunpowder River. Pinpointing the exact location on a modern map, though, proved quite a challenge.

I knew that John Fox had died in 1872 and that his wife had died five years later in 1877. However, in spite of years of searching, I had never been able to locate a will or any probate records for John.

Two years before his death, he was listed in the census as a farmer with property valued at $8000. If he had been in possession of that much property at his death, there should have been an estate to settle. No such luck, though.

If he didn't have the property when he died, then he must have disposed of it sometime before his death. A thorough search of the land records, though, revealed no such transaction. I tried searching under John's name, his wife's name, even his sons' names. Nothing.

Last night I decided to look back at the original land transaction to see if I could get some new clues. First, though, I decided to look back over some notes written years ago by a distant cousin. She also had done extensive research on the Fox property. I had looked at the notes before and followed up on some leads, but had not found what I was looking for. This time, though, I hit the jackpot. It's like I said in a previous blog: If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

After several hours of backtracking through land records, I came across a deed from April 1872 (two months before John's death) which explained everything. The deed was from H. C. Wysham, trustee, to Emma Renshaw. Since John Fox was neither the grantor nor the grantee in the transaction, his name did not show up in any indexes. However, John and his wife are mentioned in the deed. It seems that John and Mary had a mortgage on the property which was not repaid, so they lost possession of their land, which was being sold to satisfy the debt.

Now that I knew what had become of the property, I still wanted to know where it was located. Since Emma Renshaw was now the owner of the property, I searched for her name in the land record index and came across an entry which showed that she sold the property in 1881. There was a notation in the 1881 deed that the property would thereafter be known as Rockland.

With this new piece of information I tried a Google search for Rockland near Perry Hall, Maryland. Eureka! To my delight, I discovered that Rockland Farm (also known as the Spamer Homestead) is on the Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties. I followed the link on the Maryland Historical Trust website and located a 19-page PDF file about the property. A line in the first paragraph particularly caught my eye: "The 1850 Sidney map denotes the Spamer Homestead as belonging to John Fox." The PDF file contains a history of the property, a USGS map showing its location, and photos of the house which was built in the early 1800's.

If you'd like to take a look at the PDF file, follow this link:
http://www.mdihp.net/dsp_county.cfm?search=county&criteria1=R&criteria2=BA&criteria3=&id=3365&viewer=true