Cowans in North Carolina in 1820 Census

Southwest Virginia Project

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The following is intended to assist in looking at whether the Cowans who settled in Castle's Woods in Southwestern Virginia, might have come from North Carolina. These Cowans are known to have married into the family of John Walker III of the Wigton Walker line sometime between roughly 1760 and 1780. These Walkes were living in North Carolina at this time, in the area now identified as Caswell County. They showed affinities with families who lived further south in NC, in the Statesville area, but these connections are obscure at best.

The following map and table show where persons with the Cowan Surname were living in the 1820 census. This may give some guidance where we might expect to find Cowan's living prior to that. The reason for using the 1820 census data is that its readily available, and the needed data easily extracted. Tax records for each county in 1770 would give us a better idea of where the Cowans were living about the tme of the Revolution, but those data are not so readily available, and it is difficult to systematically extract such information from them.