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Series 1156
Page 2
/	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 31 st 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 records in this series relate to private land claims and those related to individual claims are organized alphabetically by names of individuals who made the 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). The other records (the list of private claims recommended for confirmation and the transcripts from the Register of Certificates) are arranged randomly.
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.
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