Land records: deeds, patents and surveys

State-land states and public-land states

The National Archives divides the country into two groups. Thirty states were created from the federal public domain: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. In these, the federal government sold or granted the land first.

The other twenty states never were federal public land. They are the original thirteen colonies plus Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, and West Virginia. Here the colony or state made the first grants, so those records are at the state archives or land office, not with the federal government. In colonial Virginia and some other colonies, many early grants were headrights, land given for each person whose passage to the colony someone had paid.

Metes and bounds

In the colonies and the state-land states, land was described by metes and bounds: a walk around the edge of the tract. A typical description starts at a marked tree or stone, runs a compass bearing for a distance, turns at another marker, and continues until it returns to the beginning. Neighbors' names often appear as boundaries, as in thence along the line of John Hart.

Distances are usually in poles, also called rods or perches, each 16 and a half feet, or in chains, each 66 feet long and divided into 100 links. If you sketch the boundary on graph paper with a protractor, you can match it to neighboring deeds and rebuild a whole neighborhood. Because trees die and streams move, these descriptions can be hard to place on a modern map, but the neighbors' names are a gift to genealogists.

The rectangular survey: townships and sections

In the public-land states, land was surveyed before it was sold, under a system that began with the Land Ordinance of 1785. Surveyors laid out a grid from a principal meridian running north and south and a base line running east and west. The land was cut into townships six miles square, each numbered by its position north or south of the base line and east or west of the meridian.

Each township holds 36 sections of one square mile, or 640 acres. Sections were split into halves and quarters, so a common farm was a quarter section of 160 acres. A legal description such as the NE quarter of section 12, township 4 north, range 3 west of the fifth principal meridian points to one exact spot, which you can find on a modern map. Do not confuse a survey township with the civil township your ancestor lived in, which may have a different name and different borders.

Federal land: patents and case files

In the public-land states, a settler could buy land with cash or on credit, use a military bounty land warrant, or, after the Homestead Act of 1862, claim free land by living on it and improving it for five years. When all requirements were met, the local land office issued a final certificate, and the General Land Office in Washington issued a patent, the document that made the settler the first private owner.

The patent itself is short. The real treasure is the land entry case file behind it at the National Archives. A homestead file can include the claimant's own statements about the house, crops and family, testimony from neighbors, and proof of citizenship, which can lead you to naturalization papers. Files for claims that were cancelled or abandoned survive too, even though no patent was ever issued.

Deeds at the county

Every later sale was recorded by a county clerk, recorder, or register of deeds. Deed books are indexed by grantor, the seller or giver, and by grantee, the buyer or receiver. Search both indexes, and search every spelling of the surname.

Read the whole deed, not just the index line. Look for wives releasing their dower rights, which can give a wife's first name. Look for deeds where several people with the same surname sell their shares of one tract, often described as heirs of a named person: that one deed can list all the children of a dead parent. A deed for love and affection is a gift, often to a child or other relative, and a token price such as one dollar can point the same way, so check whether the buyer was family. Remember that deeds were sometimes recorded years after they were signed.

The legal wording can look forbidding, but it repeats. Many deeds open with This indenture, name the consideration paid, and convey the land in fee simple, meaning full ownership that could be sold or inherited. A messuage is a house with its outbuildings and yard. A quitclaim deed hands over whatever claim the seller had, without promising the title is good, and heirs often used quitclaims to release their shares to one brother or sister.