The following index is a listing of those persons holding land in the districts of Mecklenburg in Ontario and listed by Provincial Order in Council dated “17 February 1789.” To see the scope of the Mecklenburg District, and its relationship to others of that time, and how they have evolved since, visit the Ontario Archives description of Early Districts and Counties, 1788-1899.

The report was completed by the Surveyor General in February 1790 and was addressed to Lord Dorchester. The listing was copied from a document photocopied from a document in the Public Archives of Canada entitled “Land under Certificates of Location, Districts of Mecklenburg and Lunenburg 1790 RG1, L4, Volume 12.”

The copy contained 156 pages and was dated 13 June 1966 and belongs to the United Empire Loyalists Association Archives % Elizabeth Richardson, 46 Bond Street Lindsay On. K9V 3R1

The preamble to the Mechlenburg District Report reads as follows:

My Lord

In Obedience to Your Lordships’ Order in Council of 17th February 1789, I have the honour to report the copy of a schedule with an alphabetical index of the several townships in the district of Mecklanburg showing at one view all the lots under certificates of location with the Proprietors name and Situation of his lot agreeable to the plans and reports made by the Deputy Surveyors employed on that service.

Which is humbly submitted to your Lordships’s wisdom

Surveyor General’s Office
Quebec 20 January 1789 signed “John Collins”

Addressed to “His Excellency the Right Honorable Lord Dorchester”

In using this index one must remember that the original land Allocation to the Loyalists in the district was some years prior and that additional land could have been allocated in the intervening years and that some properties would have changed hands.

No all the persons shown as holding lands in these years would be considered Loyalist in the true meaning of the word as set out by the United Empire Loyalist Association of Canada.

No all the owners would be settled on the land shown and some lands would be occupied by tenants whose names are not known.

 

Mecklenburg District

Some lands in the following Townships are listed in the report:

  • Frontenac County, Pittsburg and Kingston Townships
  • Addington County, Ernestown and Camden Townships
  • Hastings County, Sidney and Thurlow Township
  • Lennox County, Adolphustown, Richmond and Fredericksburg Townships
  • Prince Edward County, Ameliasburg, Marysborough, and Sophiasburg Townships

N.B.: In 1790, Sophiasburg Township also encompassed part of Hallowell Township while Marysborough Township encompassed part of Hallowell Township as well as Athol Township.

A number of the 1790 Lots and Concessions of Prince Edward County do not correspond with present day Lots and Concessions. It is hoped that a second edition might address this problem; a knowledgeable person’s assistance would be greatly appreciated by the Transcriber.

USAGE OF INDEXES

When using these indexes one is cautioned to check for other spellings of the family name searched for. Besides illiteracy on part of some of the land owners and the near illiteracy of some of the transcribers, many non British (in particular German) names were given an “Anglicized” phonetic spelling. In particular “F” and “V” were traded and “S”and “Z”

 

 

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