Abbott Land Records Wexford County Michigan Liber 4 page 197

I am posting information gleaned from land records in the areas where our family’s ancestors resided. You can read more about this project in the overview. You may also check my deed record listing, which I will update frequently, but probably not every day. This group pertain to early residents of Wexford County, Michigan with the surname Abbott. Papa’s second great-grandmother was Mary Jane Abbott; I have undertaken a study of the early Abbott deeds to look for connections to her and her family. I know that her brother Erastmus D. [E.D.] Abbott was in Wexford County, but have not connected any others to her at this time.

This piece of property is in or near Sherman, an early settlement in, and the first seat of Wexford County. I do not understand why the deed was not recorded until 1878, and I do not know if Abbott actually lived on this land, or used it in any way. I did fiddle around waste spend quite a bit of time looking at the area on today’s standard maps of Wexford County. The area is currently divided into lots, but none exactly match the description given on this deed, even after converting rods to feet. The best I can say is that the lot is located south of 14 mile road and north of East Church Street, between Sherman Street on the west and Nelson Street on the east. The land may have been redivided in some way, since no description starts 8 rods (627 ft) east and 22 rods (363 ft) south of the section corner. A rod is 16.5 feet.

It is probably worth noting that this is a fractional section, where allowances were made for the earth’s curvature. Some other strange things seem to have been done with the survey, you can see that the forty on the edge of the section is actually 42.20, the the next two forts toward the east are 44 acres each. I would check out the edge of Hanover township that meets Antioch to see what the acreages there are, but I would get lost looking at fooling around studying the maps and spend another half hour hour doing something that really wouldn’t benefit my search for Abbotts in Wexford County. As illustrated on a portion of the old 1889 atlas¹, the land is approximately where the red dot is.

1. E.L. Hayes & Co., Atlas of Wexford County, Michigan / compiled by Eli L. Hayes from government surveys, county and township records, and personal investigations and observations , Eli L. Hayes, (Chicago, Ill.: E.L. Hayes & Co., 1889), page 37; digital images, The University of Michigan. Michigan County Histories and Atlases. http://name.umdl.umich.edu/3928170.0001.001 : accessed 28 April 2010.