FLGenWeb is created by a group of volunteers as part of the USGenWeb Project working together to provide free genealogy websites for genealogical research in every county in Florida. This Project is non-commercial and fully committed to free genealogy access for everyone.
This article helps you access the Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land Warrants for free. Following two simple steps, one to search, and the other to browse the actual microfilms, you can quickly find your ancestors Revolutionary War pension record, or Bounty-Land record and download the images. During 1800-1900 the United States issued more than 80,000 pensions and bounty-land-warrants to soldiers of the Revolutionary War, their spouse, or their children. Was your ancestor one of them?
“Threads of Ancestors: Telford – Ritchie – Mize: A Link Among the Days Which Binds the Generations Each with Each,” authored by Leila Ritchie Mize and Jessie Julia Mize, explores the intricate tapestry of family lineage and migration across continents and centuries. Tracing roots back to Alexander Telford Sr., who settled near Rockbridge, Virginia around 1760, this book delves into the journeys and settlements of his descendants across the United States. Highlighting the Scotch-Irish origins of these families, the authors meticulously draw upon an extensive array of sources, including family Bibles, historical records, and personal diaries, to provide a detailed account of the Telford, Ritchie, and Mize families. Their narrative not only charts the genealogical paths of these families but also illuminates their substantial roles in the historical and cultural development of the regions they inhabited. This work stands as a testament to the enduring bonds and shared heritage that link successive generations, forming a foundational piece for both family members and historians interested in the Scotch-Irish contribution to American history.
3,907 land management tract books containing official records of the land status and transactions involving surveyed public lands arranged by state and then by township and range. These books indicate who obtained the land, and include a physical description of the tract and where the land is located. The type of transaction is also recorded such as cash entry, credit entry, homesteads, patents (deeds) granted by the Federal Government, and other conveyances of title such as Indian allotments, internal improvement grants (to states), military bounty land warrants, private land claims, railroad grants, school grants, and swamp grants. Additional items of information included in the tract books are as follows: number of acres, date of sale, purchase price, land office, entry number, final Certificate of Purchase number, and notes on relinquishments and conversions.
Chronicling America is a Website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). NDNP, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages. Supported by NEH, this rich digital resource will be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of Congress. An NEH award program will fund the contribution of content from, eventually, all U.S. states and territories.
This database contains War Department casualties (Army and Army Air Force personnel) from World War II for Florida. Information provided includes serial number, rank and type of casualty. The birthplace or residence of the deceased is not indicated. An introduction explaining how the list was compiled, a statistical tabulation, and the descriptions of the types of casualties incurred are also included.
Small Town Papers gives you free access to the people, places and events recorded in real time over the decades or even centuries! Browse and search the scanned newspaper archive from 1846 up to the current edition! Their archives contain millions of names of ancestors not found anywhere else. Enhance your Ancestry research with their high resolution scanned newspaper archive. Find distant relatives and discover your ethnic heritage by reading the articles about family and friends written back in the day.
BRADFORD ELLIOT JONES, of Brockton, one of the best known merchants of southeastern Massachusetts, is also one of that city’s most enterprising and successful business men, and as a citizen has been prominently identified with the growth and development of its business and financial institutions. Mr. Jones was born Sept. 22, 1840, in North Bridgewater, now Brockton, son of Rosseter and Hannah (Marshall) Jones, and a descendant of several of New England’s earliest settled families. A record of that branch of the Jones family to which Mr. Bradford E. Jones belongs follows, the generations being given in chronological order.
The Crystal River Archaeological Zone, located within Crystal River Preserve State Park in Florida, is a National Historic Landmark spread across 61.55 acres. It contains six mounds and has been one of the longest continually occupied Native American sites in Florida, with habitation lasting for at least 1,900 years. The area served as a major trade route before European involvement and now reveals significant historical artifacts from various Native American cultural periods. Despite minimal reliance on agriculture due to poor soil conditions, the occupants primarily subsisted on fishing and gathering. The complex includes burial mounds and platform mounds used for ceremonies or residences of priests, indicating a rich cultural and religious history. Notably, it also acted as a regional mortuary complex, where rituals and burials took place, drawing thousands annually. The site also features a unique garbage midden and several crudely carved stone monuments, offering insights into the diet and artistic expression of its inhabitants. Over time, there have been theories linking the architecture at Crystal River to Mayan or other Mesoamerican cultures, although these remain speculative.
The Pineland Archaeological District, covering 211 acres on Pine Island, Florida, is a significant historic district recognized since 1973. Managed by the University of Florida Foundation and other partnerships, this region showcases an array of archaeological features including shell and sand mounds, pre-European canals, and artificial structures attributed to the Calusa Indians, who dominated the area from 500 BCE until after 1700. The district evidences dramatic shifts in sea levels and climate that influenced the area’s habitation patterns. Native Americans utilized the land extensively before significant loss due to real estate development over the past 150 years. Significant components of the site include linear shell middens, monumental earthworks, and architectural residues which reflect the complex societal structures and environmental interactions of its ancient occupants. Presently reduced to around 20 acres of protected land, the remaining site still harbors valuable insights into prehistoric life on Florida’s largest island, historically shaped by both natural and human forces.
The Lake Okeechobee region contained some of the most sophisticated indigenous cultures that ever existed north of Mexico. Its towns built large earthworks and ponds in the shape of the ceremonial scepters carried by leaders in the Southeastern Ceremonial Mound Culture, but they were built several centuries before the Southeastern Ceremonial Mound Culture appeared elsewhere. Its engineers constructed several hundred miles of canals and raised causeways to interconnect the towns. They even built locks to enable cargo canoes to bypass rapids. Yet despite all this cultural precociousness, so far there is no evidence that the people of South Florida ever practiced large scale agriculture. However, intensive cultivation of raised garden beds in a semi-tropical climate, also a practice of the Mayas, may have produced a far higher percentage of their diet than anthropologists currently presume.
The Mayaimi People lived around Lake Okeechobee from at least 300 BC to until around 1700 AD. Their ancestors probably lived in the region as early as 1000 BC, because some village sites show continual cultural development from that era forward. The Mayaimi were the progenitors of the Glades Culture. During the period from around 200 AD to 1150 AD, the ancestors of the Mayaimi lived in a sophisticated society of many towns that were interconnected by canals and raised causeways. They built ceremonials mounds, complex earthworks, ball courts, ornamental ponds and earthen effigies. Almost all the symbols associated with … Read more
The Tekesta were an indigenous maritime people, whose primary villages were near the mouths of rivers along the Atlantic Coast of what are now Miami-Dade, Broward and southern Palm Beach Counties. At certain periods in the past, they also occupied the Florida Keys, but Calusa artifacts outnumber those of Tekesta in Florida Key archaeological sites, 4:1. This suggests that most of the time, the Keys were occupied by people related to the Calusa. The Tekesta were closely allied to their immediate neighbors to the north, the Jaega. Tekesta is also written in its Spanish form of Tequesta. The Castilian alphabet … Read more
The Miami Circle was discovered in 1998 during excavation for the construction of a luxury condominium at Brickell Point in Downtown Miami near the Miami River and Biscayne Bay. The developer, Michael Baumann, tore down an existing apartment complex in 1998. Prior to initiating construction of the new tower, he was required to retain archaeologists to carry out a brief field survey the site by the city’s historic preservation ordinance. However, Baumann did not do this until pressured by the Miami-Dade Historic Preservation Division Director, Bob Carr, pressured him to do so. The survey was actually carried out by municipal … Read more
During the 1500s and early 1600s, when Spanish explorers were first making contact with the indigenous inhabitants of the Florida, they made contact with a powerful nation on the southwest coast between Charlotte Harbor and Cape Sable. The first contact was made in 1513 by Juan Ponce de Leon, when he landed at the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River in southwest Florida. His landing boats were attacked by Calusa war canoes, lined with round shields. Ponce de Leon’s description of the canoes was identical to murals of Chontal Maya war canoes in the Yucatan Peninsula. The region where most of … Read more
The immensely rich archaeological heritage of South Florida is little known outside the southern tip of the Florida Peninsula. Perhaps least known are the large town sites east of Lake Okeechobee. Several have been studied by professional archaeologists and the large town sites are all now protected by some form of public ownership. The 143 acre Big Mound City and 12 acre Big Gopher Archaeological Zones are located in central Palm Beach County, Florida. They are ten miles east of Canal Point, in the J.W. Corbett Wildlife Management Area. Nearby Big Gopher is one of the best-preserved earthwork sites in … Read more
Big Mound City is the only site from the Belle Glade culture on the National Register of Historic Places. It was added in 1973 as an example of a Calusa ceremonial complex, but is now understood to have originally been constructed by the same ethnic group that built the Ortona and Wakate towns – probably ancestors of the Mayaimi. Even though its earthworks are about 1000 to 1500 years older than those of Fort Center, the architecture was extremely similar. Its final phase of occupation was probably by an ethnic group either related to the Tekesta or Mayaimi, but under … Read more
A cluster of islands on the Gulf Coast of Florida, immediately south of Naples, FL and southwest of Lake Okeechobee once held numerous mounds and town sites. Know as the Ten Thousand Islands Region, it contains the villages and mounds of an unidentified Archaic Period people, the Muspa Culture and the Calusa People, who absorbed the Muspa. The Muspa or Thousand Islands Culture in recent years has been considered a division of the Lake Okeechobee-Glades Culture. The oldest cluster of shell mounds, on what was formerly called Horr’s Island, date as far back as 4700 BC. Another mound there contains … Read more
Around the year 900 AD, the provinces of the Calusa, Mayaimi and Tekesta in southern Florida merged into one political entity that was the scale of a nation. Almost immediately, the same styles of pottery were being produced in all three provinces, and the Mayaimi town of Wakate (Guacata in Castilian) began to grow rapidly. This archaeological zone is also known as Belle Glade Mounds. It is located in Palm Beach County, Florida. The location of Wakate was at the base of a peninsula that extended into the southeast corner of Lake Okeechobee. Canoes departing from Wakate could access all … Read more
The presence of crescent shaped temple mounds in the Florida Peninsula strongly suggests cultural contacts with Maya ethnic groups, who worshiped the goddess, Ixchel. Very few Florida archaeologists have been willing to suggest publicly that Florida, Mesoamerica and South America had direct cultural contacts. Those who did, were all ostracized by their peers. However, the linguistic and architectural evidence is overwhelming for contacts between illiterate Maya merchants and the indigenous peoples in Georgia – which is north of Florida.