Hints to DeCamp genealogy in old Pennsylvania land records

Following up on a post regarding the story of my maternal DeCamp ancestors, I have found some important family tree clues through a new feature on the familysearch.org website. Their full text search lets you search huge numbers of hand written (as well as typed) documents in their collections. The transcriptions it produces of records written in script aren’t always 100% accurate, but they provide a valuable way to find names or phrases of interest that would have required many hours of searching manually in the past. Looking for the DeCamp and Stokely surnames in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania returned a wealth of land records from the late 1700s and early 1800s, at a time when settlers were pouring into that area following the Revolutionary War and land acquisition from native tribes (the land formerly occupied by indigenous peoples was ceded to the British colonies through the problematic 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwyx).

Susanna DeCamp was my 5th great grandmother on my mother’s side. I believe she was born in Virginia, and her maiden name was Gray. She settled in Westmoreland County Pennsylvania around the start of the Revolutionary War, with her first husband John DeCamp. John died in 1778, leaving Susanna a widow with three children, George, Susanna, and Sarah. I descend from Sarah, through my DeCamp – McKean – Vosler – Jordan line. Susanna the elder remarried in 1779 to Nehemiah Stokely, a captain in the 8th regiment of Pennsylvania during the war. It appears from documents revealed through the full text search that the DeCamps and the Stokelys participated jointly in acquiring land in Westmoreland County after the war ended.

In the early days of independence of the thirteen colonies, Pennsylvanians seeking to purchase property went through a series of steps that are documented in the state archives:

1. The prospective owner submitted an application for land acquisition
2. A warrant order was issued to survey the property in question
3. The survey was performed
4. A “return of survey” was produced containing measurements, description, and a diagram of the land
5. A patent (written title) was issued to the applicant

Through the familysearch and Pennsylvania State Archives websites, I was able to find a number of applications for my ancestors that were clustered together in a spot described in Susanna Stokely’s land warrant request of 1785:

“Whereas Susanna Stokely of the County of [left blank] hath requested to take up three hundred acres of land including an improvement on big Sewickly and on both sides of the Virginia Road and on both sides of Hooks Run adjoining lands of Gideon Miller, of Tho^s Kerr on the south, James Brotherton on the east, of George Grey Decamp on the West in the county of Westmoreland (provided the land is not within the last purchase made of the Indians) for which she agrees to pay immediately in the office of the Receiver General for the use of this state, at the rate of ten pounds per hundred acres”.

My assumption is that the Virginia Road mentioned was Braddocks Road that ran from Virginia to Westmoreland County. Requests for 250 acres made by Sarah DeCamp, and 300 for George DeCamp, describe the same area. Interestingly, in 1785 George was only 11 years old, and Sarah was 7. Apparently, buying land in children’s names was done to allow owners to buy more land and consolidate lots into one large holding.

The genealogical hints contained in the land warrant note shown in the photo concern the middle names of Susannah Stokley’s children. In a previous post, I looked at old family lore that Susannah Decamp Stokely was related to James Monroe through her Gray ancestors. Other than a nineteenth century newspaper obituary that stated Susannah’s maiden name was Gray and she was related to James Monroe, and family oral tradition passed down over the generations, I have no written proof of the Gray/Monroe connection. The land warrant note, however, does seem to back up the old story, as Susannah apparently gave her son the middle name of Gray, and I suspect that Sarah’s middle name is Monroe, although the writer of the document has spelled it phonetically as “Minro” – they also misspelled DeCamp as DeComp. In 1785, James Monroe was a senator for the state of Virginia, and would become Governor of Virginia in 1799 and President of the United States in 1817.

This is the first evidence I have seen of George and Sarah DeCamp’s middle names, providing another clue to their family origins and the details of their settlement in what was, at the time, the western frontier of the newly independent United States.

Sources

1. Familysearch.org full text search function, released 2025
2. Pennsylvania State Archives, Records of the Land Office
3. Familysearch.org, Pennsylvania Land and Property, 2026
4. Penn State University Digital Libraries, “An historical map of Pennsylvania : showing the Indian names of streams and villages, and paths of travel : the sites of old forts and battlefields : the successive purchases from the Indians : and the names and dates of counties and county towns : with tables of forts and proprietary manors“, map created in 1785
5. Encyclopedia of Virginia, The Treaty of Stanwyx (1768), 2026