This might have been asked before. I recently discovered that my family were loyalists who owned a 600 acre tobacco plantation and several slaves in NC in the 1700s and it seems that after the war we started moving west into Appalachia. Just trying to understand what their circumstances might have been.
The answer here is probably a bit unsatisfying: the confiscation of Loyalist property really differed colony to colony, and could even differ in similar cases. For example, Massachusetts was particularly thorough in confiscating Loyalist property through a series of acts passed in 1779. Confiscated land was then sold by the colonial government. By 1781, the sale of loyalist property in Suffolk County Massachusetts had netted a total of £57,768 in Massachusetts state currency.
Other colonies quickly followed suit to follow Massachusetts' confiscation laws; however, these colonies quickly found their "Loyalist property problem" was more complex. In MA, the majority of confiscated property belonged to absentees, that is those who fled their homes for Nova Scotia or Great Britain. While MA Loyalists fled with the British from Boston in March 1776 under with the idea that their exile would be brief. As the war spread to other colonies, British sympathizers were under no such delusions, and many tried to stay on their land.
For example, even though her husband had been an important figure in the British occupation of Philadelphia, Grace Growden Galloway remained in her family's country and city estate after the British evacuated. Although Galloway was no friend of the rebels, her relationship with her husband was tumultuous and she eventually came to understand he had taken their only daughter to England and abandoned her. Galloway petitioned that she had not supported the British like her husband in an attempt to keep her family's property. She was physically removed from her home in the summer of 1777. She died months later. In a case similar to Galloway's, however, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson was able to maintain her estate. Like Galloway, her husband had been a British official in Philadelphia. When her husband during the British retreat, Elizabeth remained an petitioned that she had never supported the British and was allowed to maintain her estate. It is not entirely clear on why Galloway was removed while Fergusson was allowed to remain, but it might have been due to the fact that Fergusson did not have any children and therefore could not use her property to bring family back to the United States.
Although South Carolina passed wide-reaching confiscation laws, ultimately, the only property that the government officially confiscated was from absentees and British establishments like the customs house. This does not take into account, however, the land that changed hands during the civil war that raged in the backcountry.
North Carolina passed confiscation laws in November 1776, and January 1777. You might want to look at James Iredell, ed. Laws of the State of North Carolina (Edenton: Hodge and Wills, 1791), 281, as some colonies listed the specific families targeted. But if the family stayed in the United States and moved west rather than flee to other regions of the empire, it's my guess that they weren't "Loyalists" in terms of strict commitment to the empire. Rather, I would fathom that the family was targeted during the largely unregulated civil war that ragged in the backcountry. This probably had less to do with British vs American allegiances and more to do with settling long-standing grievances.
WORKS TO CONSULT:
Rebecca Brannon, From Revolution to Reunion: The Reintegration of the South Carolina Loyalists (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2016).
Robert Calhoon and Timothy Barnes “The Reintegration of the Loyalists and the Disaffected,” in Robert M. Calhoon, Timothy M. Barnes, and Robert S. Davis eds., Tory Insurgents: The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays (Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 2010), 350-369.
Peter N. Moore, “The Local Origins of Allegiance in Revolutionary South Carolina: The Waxhaws as a Case Study,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 107, No. 1 (January 2006): 27.
David Maas, “The Return of the Massachusetts Loyalists,” (PhD Diss., University of Wisconsin, 1972).
Aaron N. Coleman, “Loyalists in War, Americans in Peace, 1775-1800,” (PhD diss., University of Kentucky, 2008).
Richard D. Brown, “The Confiscation and Disposition of Loyalists' Estates in Suffolk County, Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 21, no. 4 (October, 1964).
Anne M. Ousterhout, The Most Learned Woman in America: A Life of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).
John E. Ferling, The Loyalist Mind: Joseph Galloway and the American Revolution (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1977).