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A Gazetteer for the United States and Canada
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Our Genealogy Helper

Introduction ...

We have a couple of goals for our Gazetteer:

  • That it be a tool which helps us with planning our trips.
  • We're trying to shape our Gazetteer as a tool to help us understand the community in which our ancestors lived, the community that was part of their daily lives.
  • On our trips, we try to visit those places where our ancestors left their footprints.

By learning about Waylands Mill (and the surrounding area) during the time that our ancestors lived, we hope to have a better understanding of both their community and its relationship to their lifes. We hope that this tool helps to give us an insight into their world.

As we add data and organize our Gazetteer to help with our family research, we will be adding to this our Genealogical Helper for Waylands Mill. While we don't have information that is specific to any given person or family, we intend to expand our understanding about where and how people lived.

Name Variations for Waylands Mill ...

When searching records, keep in mind that names and their spelling can change over time. Our sources include documents like maps, railroad schedules, Travel, Express and Shipping Guides. Many of these documents date from the 1800's and it's common to find spelling differences.

Although we can't give a definitive list, hopefully the following will give you a feel for the variations that might have occurred.

  • A typical abbreviation for Waylands Mill: Waylands Ml. (or less commonly used: Waylands Mll.)
  • While the name of this community is Waylands Mill, be aware that it's the common practice of mapmakers to remove the apostrophe from possessive names<1>. So Waylands Mill may originally have been Wayland's Mill.

    Sometimes the trailing 's' might be dropped altogether, in which case Waylands Mill might be written as Wayland Mill.

If you have information about these names (such as the reason for the change, date of change, the origin of the name), please Contact Us.

Neighboring Counties ...

When searching for family records, we have frequently made the mistake of not checking the neighboring counties.

For example, we have great-grandparents who lived in the northwest corner of their home county. During their lives, most doctors and hospitals were in the next county to the west. Almost all of the nearby churches and cemeteries were in the county to the north.

So when searching for records, we had our best success by looking in neighboring counties instead of the county in which they lived:  their home county contained property and probate records; the county to the west contained birth and death records; the county to the north contained their burial records. If we hadn't included the neighboring counties, we would have missed many valuable sources of information.

If you're in a similar situation, we hope that the following information helps.

Waylands Mill is located in Culpeper County.

To see how the shape of Virginia's counties have changed over time, we recommend the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries.

The following counties adjoin and form the boundaries of Culpeper County: Fauquier, Madison, Orange, Rappahannock, Spotsylvania & Stafford.

Below are the counties that are near Waylands Mill. For each of these counties, we show a sample of those communities that are closest to Waylands Mill:

For an expanded list of the communities that are closest to Waylands Mill, see our County-by-County Page for Waylands Mill.

Cemeteries Near Waylands Mill ...

Below are cemeteries that are in the vicinity of Waylands Mill.

This is a new section and is likely to have errors. If you find an error, such as a missing cemetery or we have the wrong name, please let us know. If you know of them, we would also appreciate learning about previous or alternate names.

Although we don't have the information ourselves, if you need information about a burial or interment, photos, transcripts, how to contact the cemetery or local authorities, please visit our list of websites on our Genealogy Helper Page for Waylands Mill - one of the links might be able to help.

If not found below, our Cemetery List for Waylands Mill covers a larger area, with the cemeteries listed in alphabetical order.

The following cemeteries are listed based on their distance from Waylands Mill, with the one closest to Waylands Mill listed first.

Nearby Communities in 1895 ...

We've built the following list with information that came from an Atlas published by Rand McNally in 1895. The Atlas had details such as the population of the community (which appears to have come from the 1890 Census) and whether there was a post office and/or railroad service available. We also indicate if the community no longer exists and is now historic.<7>

While we didn't find Waylands Mill in the Atlas, the following 1895 communities would have been found near the current location of Waylands Mill.

These communities are listed based on their distance from Waylands Mill, with the one closest to Waylands Mill listed first.

  • Leon
    (2 miles [3.2 km] to the northwest)
    • Note: The GPS coordinates that we are using for Leon have been provided by the GNIS.<4> The coordinates still need to be verified.
    • Jump to our Gazetteer entry for Leon
    • Leon is located in Madison County
    • Jump to TripAdvisor's Tourism page for Leon <2>
  • Clarkson
    (3 miles [4.8 km] to the north)
    • Note: The GPS coordinates that we are using for Clarkson have been provided by the GNIS.<4> The coordinates still need to be verified.
    • Jump to our Gazetteer entry for Clarkson
    • Clarkson is located in Culpeper County
  • Winston
    (4 miles [6.4 km] to the east)
    • Note: The GPS coordinates that we are using for Winston have been provided by the GNIS.<4> The coordinates still need to be verified.
    • Jump to our Gazetteer entry for Winston
    • Winston is located in Culpeper County
  • Locust Dale
    (5 miles [8 km] to the south)
    • Note: The GPS coordinates that we are using for Locust Dale have been provided by the GNIS.<4> The coordinates still need to be verified.
    • Jump to our Gazetteer entry for Locust Dale
    • Locust Dale is located in Madison County
    • Jump to TripAdvisor's Tourism page for Locust Dale <2>
  • Rapidan
    (6 miles [9.7 km] to the south)
    • Note: The GPS coordinates that we are using for Rapidan have been provided by the GNIS.<4> The coordinates still need to be verified.
    • Jump to our Gazetteer entry for Rapidan
    • Rapidan is located in Culpeper County
    • Jump to TripAdvisor's Tourism page for Rapidan <2>
  • Twymans Mill
    (7 miles [11.3 km] to the southwest)
    • Note: The GPS coordinates that we are using for Twymans Mill have been provided by the GNIS.<4> The coordinates still need to be verified.
    • Jump to our Gazetteer entry for Twymans Mill
    • Twymans Mill is located in Madison County
  • Culpeper
    (7 miles [11.3 km] to the northeast)
  • Norman
    (7 miles [11.3 km] to the north)
  • Madison Mills
    (8 miles [12.9 km] to the south)
  • Haywood
    (8 miles [12.9 km] to the west)
    • Note: The GPS coordinates that we are using for Haywood have been provided by the GNIS.<4> The coordinates still need to be verified.
    • Jump to our Gazetteer entry for Haywood
    • Haywood is located in Madison County
  • Boston
    (9 miles [14.5 km] to the north)
    • Note: The GPS coordinates that we are using for Boston have been provided by the GNIS.<4> The coordinates still need to be verified.
    • Jump to our Gazetteer entry for Boston
    • Boston is located in Culpeper County
    • Jump to TripAdvisor's Tourism page for Boston <2>
  • Raccoon Ford
    (9 miles [14.5 km] to the east)
    • Note: The GPS coordinates that we are using for Raccoon Ford have been provided by the GNIS.<4> The coordinates still need to be verified.
    • Jump to our Gazetteer entry for Raccoon Ford
    • Raccoon Ford is located in Culpeper County
  • Continue List   (20 more) ...

We've also created an expanded list of communities that existed in the 1890's and were located in the area around Waylands Mill. See our List of 1890's Communities around Waylands Mill.

Newspapers Published in Waylands Mill ...

An ongoing effort between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has resulted in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).

To share their results, the partnership has created the Chronicling America website. The goal of this partnership is to assemble a database about the current and historic newspapers of the United States. This includes a growing collection of scanned images from selected papers. All of it available to the public on their website.

Using information that we've taken from the Chronicling America website, we've identified 30 newspapers that have been published in the area around Waylands Mill.

Although we're unaware of any newspapers that were published in the immediate area of Waylands Mill, there are papers which were published within 11 miles [17.7 km]<6>. A list of those papers, sorted by paper name, can be found on the Extended Newspaper List for Waylands Mill.

Websites to Help With Your Genealogy Research ...

When we do our genealogical research, we first visit the websites from Cyndi's List, FamilySearch and Genealogy Trails. These websites either offer the information directly or else point to where you can find it. Their information is open to everyone.

To help you get started, the following links will take you to the pages that are relevant to Waylands Mill:

Footnotes ...

<1>It's generally believed that possessive apostrophes are removed to prevent confusion on maps where the apostrophe may be confused with a cartographic symbol. While this is generally true, it's not uncommon to find possessive apostrophes in administrative names (such as towns or counties).
<2>While we're fans and frequent users of TripAdvisor, you should know that we're also members of the TripAdvisor affiliate program.
<3>An 'estimated' location is one where we have been given GPS coordinates, but are unable to verify the accuracy of those coordinates. That said, we have some confidence that we have placed the marker near the actual location. A typical reason for being unable to verify a location is that it might be on private property or maybe historic and gone without an obvious trace.
<4>The location has been supplied by the Geographic Names Information System - which is maintained by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). While these values should be definitive, we found that accuracy can vary and you should double-check the location if accuracy is required.
<5>The Find-a-Grave website is an excellent research tool with information about a cemetery's location and interments. They also offer a forum for their members which can provide additional help. More information about Find-a-Grave can be found on their website: findagrave.com.
<6>Our distances are not driving distances, but are calculated as a 'point-to-point' distance. A straight line distance ignores obstructions like rivers, canyons, lakes, et cetera - it's truly a line drawn from Point A (ie- Waylands Mill) to Point B.Our distance measurements begin at a specific point in Waylands Mill. The point we use is located at these GPS coordinates - Latitude: 38.4066, Longitude: -78.1011       In this case, the coordinates for Waylands Mill have been provided by the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS).
<7>We use the term 'Historic' broadly and it generally means that the community no longer exists. However, it can also mean that the community might still exist, but was significantly larger or had a more 'official' existence in the past than it does now. Unfortunately our sources of data have proven to be unreliable. If you can provide us with more specific information about Waylands Mill, please let us know so that we can improve our accuracy.