Introduction

William Anderson of Anderson's Bottom

William Anderson, who was born in Scotland in the early 1690's, was my great (6 times) grandfather. He came to America in about 1715 and owned a number of properies in Maryland and Virginia (in what is now West Virginia). His two most important properties were Anderson's Delight and Anderson's Bottom.

This page is a repository for a number of primary and secondary sources I have William and his properties, as well as my own analysis of those documents. The data includes scans of a number of original documents that I've obtained from my cousin John Philips and from The Library of Virginia's web site. The scans posted here are often not the most detailed that I have. I'm putting this page together in order to have easily accessible versions of the data to aid my interpretation, and potentially others. To that end, this page tends to include more manageable versions.

In addition to scans of these documents I have transcriptions of them done by my wife, Selma. The transcriptions have not yet been fully proofread and the quality of the scan as well as the old-fashioned handwriting and spelling make the process of transcription difficult.

Finally, this page includes a number of computer generated diagrams of the boundaries of the properties surveyed in the plats and deeds scanned. I produced these with a program I wrote that takes a simplified form of the surveyors notation and plots it. Next to each of these diagrams is a table showing the data used to create it. The data in the table corresponds to the dark line in the diagram. The red line in each diagram represents a final line drawn by the program connecting the last point plotted to the first.

Anderson's Bottom
Historical Fiction
by John C. Philips
My cousin, John Philips, who has been invaluable in providing some of the original research material used in these pages, has written a book historical fiction featuring William Anderson and named after the most important of his properties, Anderson's Bottom. Anyone interested in the Anderson family will likely find this book of interest.