Land records provide two types of important evidence for the genealogist. First, they often state kinship ties, especially when a group of heirs jointly sells some inherited land. Second, they place individuals in a specific time and place, allowing the researcher to sort people and families into neighborhoods and closely related groups. By locating people with reference to creeks and other natural features, the deeds, land grants, and land tax lists help distinguish one John Anderson, son of Mark, from another John Anderson in the same county. Prior to the Civil War, most free adult males owned land; so if the land records of an area have survived but do not mention your ancestor, you should reevaluate the assumption that he or she lived in the area.
Most beginning genealogists underestimate the importance of using land records to pin persons to specific locales. In the South, which has far fewer vital records than New England, the land records are even more crucial to genealogical success.
Many of the land records mentioned in this chapter have been microfilmed ans some are transcribed online. The Genealogical Society of Utah includes state land grants and county and some city deeds among its routinely microfilmed records. The society formerly microfilmed deed books only up to 1850, later up to the Civil War, and still later—in some cases but not all—the subsequent volumes. Sometimes cumulative deed indexes exist but were not microfilmed. Thus, despite the society’s vast number of land records on microfilm, you should not regard its catalog as a complete inventory of what survives.
Other microfilmed records belong to libraries and archives that have made their manuscript collections of private land company papers and other records available. The millions of federal land patents have also been microfilmed and are available through the Bureau of Land Management
Deeds form the bulk and backbone of American land records. They are fairly uniform in format and content, can normally be located in routinely predictable jurisdictions—usually the county—and generally present few difficulties for the average researcher. Being one of the most important components of the workaday civil law (as opposed to criminal law), deeds contain a fair measure of legal terms. Genealogy Encyclopedia provides definitions of land of legal terms.
The term “deed” can be used broadly to mean a legal document of transfer, bargain, or contract, or narrowly for a warranty deed by which the seller warrants (guarantees) the title to the land being sold. Deed books contain many types of title conveyances and contracts: deeds in fee simple granting absolute ownership, mortgages transferring property rights as security for a debt, dower releases waiving a wife’s rights, quitclaim deeds releasing whatever title or right is held whether valid or not, deeds of gift transferring land without a reciprocal consideration except perhaps “love and affection,” powers of attorney appointing legal agents, marriage property settlements between spouses either before or after the marriage, bills of sale transferring property that is usually not land, and various forms of contracts, such as leases, partnerships, indenture papers, and other performance bonds. These last four were not ordinarily recorded, though probate bonds were common in probate volumes. Deed books from before the Civil War and especially in colonial years were more miscellaneous in their contents, even including animal brands, occasional wills, slave manumissions, apprentice papers, petitions, depositions, tax lists, and whatever else the clerk decided to preserve on a convenient page.
European settlers and their governments brought to the colonies the principle that before land could be privately owned the government had to pass title into private hands. Thus, for any tract of land there should be a first-title deed, which is normally called a grant or patent. Usually the authorities sought from the local Indian tribes a cession of Indian title, though this concept of owning land was foreign to the Indian view of communal occupancy. Once the Indian title was terminated to the satisfaction of the whites, the government could grant title for a tract to an individual, corporation, or, in the case of federal grants, even to a state. All subsequent transfers of a tract are by deed or analogous conveyance, or by inheritance.
In the United States, responsibility for guaranteeing legal title rests with the buyer and seller, who nowadays usually employ professional title searchers and lawyers to trace the chain of title back to the first-title grant if possible, attempting to verify a valid, unencumbered title transfer at each step. The government limits itself to the role of a referee—supplying the rules, recording the results, and adjudicating disputes brought to court. To simplify such title searches, title abstract and insurance companies have arisen to make professional searches and sell insurance against defective titles. Such companies have compiled indexes to title transfers in their local areas. If a genealogist can afford the high expense, such a title company could compile an ancestor’s local land records. Also, there are cases where the local deed office has been destroyed recently but abstracts survive in the private title company records.
An important fact follows from the American system of deed registrations: The records are usually sought by the names of the buyer or seller rather than the tract name or number. This means that a break in the chain of recorded owners can complicate a genealogist’s understanding of why, in the absence of a deed, John Smith now owns land that Mary Smith owned ten years ago. The land could have passed from mother to son by will with proof only in the probate records, or it could have passed by intestate probate and not be recorded at all. It could also be that the two persons are unrelated and that Mary sold the land to Paul Williams, who then sold it to John Smith, neither of the deeds being recorded, perhaps to save the cost of the clerk’s fees. Or perhaps the deed from Mary Smith to John Smith was by sheriff’s sale and indexed under the sheriff’s name as seller. Such a sheriff’s sale for delinquent taxes raises the point that tax foreclosures affecting the land would be in court records, while a bankruptcy suit might be processed in another county entirely.
A registry system called Torrens attempts to resolve some of these problems. Named for Robert Richard Torrens, the South Australian legislator who developed it in the late 1850s, Torrens ideally records in one place under the title of the tract all former owners and all rights, interests, and liens to which the property is subject. Having established the registry as mandatory and complete, the government can then issue guaranteed certificates of title to a new owner. While available in about twenty states, Torrens has not operated in the United States as intended for several reasons, including constitutional questions of right of appeal to the courts, the great expense of the registration, inadequate insurance funds to insure title guarantees, the statutory exclusion of certain encumbrances from the Torrens records, and—it is said—sabotage by private title companies and lawyers fearing loss of business.
For the genealogist, the advantage of a Torrens chain of title may be offset where the deed indexes are by tract rather than buyer and seller, a situation said to operate in parts of Iowa. Usually there are two sets of indexes, one by tract and one by buyer and seller. If there are no buyer and seller indexes, the genealogist would need to search each tract record to insure comprehensive coverage of an ancestor’s land transactions in the county. However, Torrens has never flourished in the United States, so the chances are small that the researcher will encounter this particular problem.
The variety of records in deed books requires the user to develop certain searching and abstracting skills. Because few researchers have the time to read, page by page, the forty, fifty, or one hundred volumes of deeds in an average county or independent city, the user usually turns to the index. Seller indexes are also called direct and grantor indexes; buyer indexes are indirect and grantee indexes. Some counties have alphabetical indexes only for sellers, which requires reading all index entries from A to Z to check the buyers (for example, the buyers would be listed next to the sellers, but only the sellers are alphabetized). Before relying on a deed index, it is wise to make an informal sampling of the contents of the deed volumes to see if they contain records significantly different from deeds and if these different sorts of records are indexed along with the deeds. There actually exist deed volumes containing wills omitted from the deed index and not found in the probate indexes either.
While cumulative deed indexes are usually in alphabetical order (“alpha” order), running indexes cannot be because more names are continually being added. Some running indexes merely group surnames under their first letter (initial order), so all A surnames are together (unalphabetized), all B surnames together, etc., with special pages for Mc and O’. Occasionally, a clerk ignored the patronymic prefix and indexed MacDonald, for example, with D surnames and O’Carroll under C. More elaborate running indexes were sold commercially by companies vying for sales by inventing unique, eye-catching systems. Such complicated indexing systems must be mastered when encountered, though usually there are instructions in the front of the volume. Some allocate separate pages for vowels (surnames Ba, Be, Bi . . .), some for consonants (the l-m-n-r-t system brings Chalkley, Cullison, and Czeskleba to the same page, because each has an l as the first internal “key” letter). Some running indexes use an initial surname order subdivided by initial letters of the given name (so Gregory Buck, Gary Ball, and Gertrude Brown are all on the same page).
Other problems with indexes are sins of omission—creating only a grantor index, mistakenly omitting a name, or ignoring non-deed items. This last problem is fairly common, especially in alphabetized master-deed indexes compiling all the deed volumes of the last one hundred or two hundred years. Whether the indexer will consider the barrel brand of Thomas Forehall, cooper, worth indexing is doubtful, especially because it was recorded 150 years ago and can serve no contemporary purpose. The researcher must always choose between trusting the index or checking the book or needed years page by page. Deeds with more than one buyer or seller may be indexed under the first’s name only, another reason to take the time to read page by page if the problem warrants it. There is also the occasional deed that provides information on a surname different from either the seller or buyer. On 7 May 1763, William and Betty Eskridge of Northumberland County, Virginia, sold land to Thomas Williams and, in passing, the deed gave a beautiful account of the Neale family, former owners of the land.
Having found an actual entry in the deed volume, either by using the index or by page-by-page scanning, you should have a fairly standard format for abstracting entries. It is wise to train yourself to first write down the source (or, if you have photocopied the entry, to immediately write the source on the photocopy). The source includes the archive or library where you found the record, as well as the record type, volume, and page. Below are three examples. Printed notekeeping forms help some people remember to copy such sources. Be sure also to include your name and the date when you found the record.
As for abstracting a deed, the style is up to the researcher. Find a format you like and try to standardize it within adaptable limits. Records tend to follow standard formats, which makes abstracting easier.
Some users forget that the deed book is a copy of an original paper and that, therefore, the deed book signatures are usually in the clerk’s handwriting—they are not holographs. Some jurisdictions, however, did require a signature on the copy they retained, so watch for them. Likewise, the seal—in wax and later in paper—beside the seller’s signature was real on the original; but, in the deed book, the clerk drew a stylized circle surrounding the word “seal.” The use of personal wax seals has long been out of fashion; but in the colonies, men were expected to have or borrow some sort of sealing device, which usually supplemented the illiterate’s mark. Even English peasants as early as the thirteenth century were required by law to seal their signatures; in fact, there was a time when the seal was the official attestation and the person’s mark was auxiliary. By the late seventeenth century, the seal was merely a traditional ornament. Consequently, heraldic devices on colonial seals probably do not prove a signer had a coat or arms. In fact, George Washington had a seal with a device different from the family coat of arms, a fairly typical situation.
Seals and signatures are, however, minor problems compared to late recording. Since running indexes show names in chronological order, a 1735 deed recorded in 1802 is so out of place that the researcher may not carry the search far enough to spot it. Actual examples include a deed dated 31 March 1800 and recorded 21 March 1896 in Montgomery County, Georgia, with another in the same place dated 30 December 1791 and recorded 110 years later on 30 July 1901. In the same general category are deeds re-recorded after a courthouse or town hall burned. Also be alert to indexes that show only the recording date, because behind the 1827 date could be an 1818 deed. If the ancestor died in 1823, the researcher might mistakenly conclude from the index that an 1827 deed could not be the ancestor’s.
Deeds normally locate the land tract by some legal description with a survey. The thirty states where the federal government granted land use the federal township and range system and include a special subcategory called private land claims. First, however, will be described the remaining twenty states, called state-land states, which granted their own lands and have various surveying systems.
The twenty state-land states are the thirteen original states from New Hampshire to Georgia and Maine, Vermont, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, and Hawaii. The remaining eighteen can be divided between the six New England states, which used the New England town system, the transitional state of New York, and the remaining states from Pennsylvania and New Jersey southward, which used the southern system of metes and bounds.
Southern Land Grants
The “tomahawk” grant is part of American folklore. The buckskin-clad squatter cut blazes on a perimeter of trees that surrounded his newly picked tract of wilderness, and then off he went to a land office to get a deed. He entered his claim (the petition) and got official authorization (a warrant) to have the tract surveyed to produce a legal description (the plat) so that the government could grant title to that piece of land (the first-title deed, usually called a grant or patent).
In the absence of a surveyed grid of meridians, baselines, townships, and ranges by which the land can be legally described, the description must use local features, usually called “metes and bounds,” which requires the “measuring” and “naming” of boundary features. The distances in patents and deeds were usually in poles, rods, or perches (all synonyms) of sixteen and a half feet.
Strictly speaking, because they used compass bearings, nearly all southern tracts were not in metes and bounds. A more correct term is the “indiscriminate” survey, meaning that the survey was not part of any larger survey grid. This section, however, will employ the common composite term of “indiscriminate metes and bounds.” Since the natural or man-made features of the description tended to disappear over the years, the property owner, in the company of local officials, neighbors, and sometimes a surveyor, might retrace the property bounds and mark again from memory or from a new survey those points that were disappearing or lost. This walking and remarking of the bounds was called “processioning.”
Unlike in New England, lands in the southern system were usually allotted directly to individuals. In New York, a transition zone, large grants were often made to wealthy individuals who subdivided and sold the grants in small parcels. In Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the colonies to the south, the allotted lands were usually farm-size tracts that went directly to individuals. There were some very large grants in the southern colonies, especially Virginia. Two of the largest were 92,000 acres to Benjamin Borden and 118,000 acres to William Beverley, both in 1739 in the upper Shenandoah Valley, both part of the total 539,000 acres granted by 1740 to eight individuals or partnerships.
Land offices handled the paperwork of petitioning and obtaining the individual grants. It is extraordinary that in the colonies from Pennsylvania to Georgia and their offspring of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, no land offices were destroyed in a major fire. In the Civil War, the state capitals of Virginia and South Carolina were burned, yet the land office records survived. Nearly every one of the early states south of Pennsylvania still has a land office either as a distinct section of the state archive or as a division of an active state office.
The authority granting colonial lands was not always the government. There were three variations:
The English monarch controlled the government and granted the land through the governor. Examples are New York after 1689, South Carolina after 1729, and Georgia after 1754.
The monarch controlled the government but gave a private citizen or citizens (proprietors) the right to grant the land; examples are the Northern Neck Proprietary of Lord Fairfax in Virginia and the Granville District of Earl Granville in North Carolina.
the English monarch allowed a private citizen or citizens to control the government and grant the land, as in Pennsylvania under the Penns and in Georgia under the trustees, 1733 to 1754. Where the proprietors were distinct from government, there will be land office records distinct from government records, as in New Jersey, Virginia, and North Carolina, though these records may later have been added to the government archives, as in Virginia and North Carolina but not New Jersey.
There were several ways to acquire first title to lands, but usually they followed the four steps of petition, warrant, survey/plat, and grant/patent.
The petition is a request to take up land. The petitioner may have gone before the appropriate officials—the colony’s council or the land office clerk—and presented a satisfactory reason for getting land, such as paying the purchase price, being promised land for military service, bringing an immigrant into the colony and thus becoming eligible for the headright land bounty (especially used in the South), or being able to produce a government order for a specified amount of land.
The warrant certifies the right to a specific acreage and authorizes an official surveyor to survey it, assuming no prior and conflicting claims.
The plat, sometimes called a survey, is the surveyor’s drawing of the legal description so that the land is identifiable—his certification that everything is in order so far as the warrant, approved acreage, and legal description are concerned.
The patent/grant is the government’s or proprietor’s passing of title to the patentee/grantee. This is the first-title deed and the true beginning of private ownership of the land.
The government or proprietor usually entered a copy of the patent in a bound volume as a permanent, official record. The plats were sometimes recorded in volumes, and the surveyor’s loose copy was sometimes also kept. The North Carolina Land Office, for example, has many loose surveys. Some land offices kept permanent warrant records; some did not. The petition was rarely recorded because the warrant was the formal statement of an authorized petition, though petitioner information is occasionally found in council minutes—especially for colonial headrights.
Bringing oneself or another person to the colonies entitled the importer to a “headright” of land at specific historical periods. Virginia granted fifty acres per importation, but sailors abused it by claiming fifty acres every time they sailed to Virginia, then sold their claims. In the case of indentured servants, the fifty acres went to the person who paid the servant’s passage. These headrights could be bought and sold, so the person claiming two hundred acres for importing four persons was not necessarily the person who actually paid the passage costs. Thus, if Mark Randle claimed 450 acres for transporting nine persons, including Mary Randle, it is possible Mark merely bought headrights to nine persons and never saw or knew Mary. It is also possible that Mary paid her own passage and sold her headright rather than claim the land. Furthermore, the nine persons need not have come on the same ship nor arrived in the same year.
New England did not have this system of headrights as a rule, though granting free land to town settlers was a form of reward for immigration. The Southern proprietors rarely gave headrights—the Calverts did for a time—because they sold land for a profit. The crown tried at times to make the colonies grant lands to indentured servants at the end of their service, but this was uncommon. Despite these caveats, the headright lists are valuable as the major or only immigration record for most colonial immigrants from the British Isles to the South.
The patent and related documents rarely give kinship information, so their great value is in locating the grantee in a specific time and place.
The surveys of the 1600s were quite crude. Early Virginia surveys often merely gave a distance along a river and indicated that the rectangle into the woods was a certain number of acres. Descriptive bounds giving only “up the meanders of the creek” must be approximated based on the remaining precise bounds, sometimes with the help of neighboring tracts. Copy errors by clerks—N 56 degrees E 76 poles instead of the correct N 56 degrees W 176 poles—can make it impossible to close the tract’s perimeters, but the contiguous tracts may supply the corrections. Figure 8-1 explains how to draw plat maps.
Some early colonial descriptions have strange directions, such as SE 1/2 E or ES 1/2 S or even WNW 1/4 N. These refer to the thirty-two-point compass card, which is described in Sarah S. Hughes, Surveyors and Statesmen: Land Measuring in Colonial Virginia (Richmond: Virginia Surveyors Foundation and The Virginia Association of Surveyors, 1979), a book worth reading by anyone interested in Southern indiscriminate surveys.
Fortunately, these compass card directions were rarely used. Dividing ninety degrees into eight parts gives eight 11-degree, 15-minute sections, which, given the imprecision of a modern small protractor and surveyors’ very rough angles in the 1600s, means the angles can be treated as N = 0 degrees, N by E = 11 degrees, NNE = 22 degrees, N = 34 degrees . . . , E by N = 11 degrees, E = 0 degrees. Sometimes the angle is NE by N½ N, meaning halfway between NE by N and NNE.
When researching deeds and surveys, you must decide whether to copy the detailed bounds. Much depends on whether the records will be easily available for future checking. Photocopies can help but are expensive when they start accumulating. A wise approach may be to not copy the precise bounds (unless time is no problem or platting is planned) but instead to abstract the usual information, noting carefully all neighbors. Thus, copies can later be ordered of those descriptions that seem to adjoin. If the bounds are to be copied, a simple notekeeping system is:
John Lemon, Northern Neck patent K171, 1 Jly 1760, Frederick Co., Va., survey by Thomas Rutherford, Jr.,
Begin locust and black oak,
w/ Lemon
S 10 W 38
locust
w/ Francis Lilburn
N 80 W 40
white oak
S 20 W 190
black oak
N 70 W 200
locust on hill
N 20 E 240 2
black oaks
S 70 E 235
to beginning
311 acres
Sometimes a course says “with Francis Lilburn’s line” and gives the bearings and distance; sometimes it gives a bearing and direction and then tells what feature is met. Centering the bearing and distance information on the page leaves space right and left for such descriptions. These natural features and adjoining landowners are important because they help match contiguous tracts. The difficulty of drawing tract maps is well worth the trouble for difficult lineage problems.
New England Towns
While the Southern and New England land systems shared most of the same terminology, they differed fundamentally in that New England grants usually went to a group of men called town proprietors. Upon receipt of a block of land, these town proprietors surveyed parts of their large tract, apportioned out village home sites and field strips for themselves and others, and oversaw the subsequent disbursements of “divisions” of land until all the grant had passed into private ownership except for the town commons and local government lots. Thus, whereas the Southern grants to individuals created a rural landscape of scattered farms with very few towns, the New England grants created a society of villages.
The origin of the New England town extends back to the first settlers of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, where the Pilgrims and Puritans strove to establish a congregation-community uniting church and civil government into God’s commonwealth. As new lands were needed to feed the growing population, groups of prospective settlers would petition a colony’s government for land to establish a new town, praying to be constituted the official proprietors to distribute the land within the town. The town was a geographical unit extending beyond the village to some agreed boundaries with the neighboring towns. The early towns were irregularly shaped; the later ones tended to run six miles by six miles in size. Thus, the town bounds had to be established so that a formal grant could be issued to the proprietors. The religious fervor of Puritanism later declined, but the town form of the congregation-community survived and was carried throughout most of New England and even into eastern New York and northeastern New Jersey. There was, however, a pressing tendency for pople to move out of the village to be nearer their fields, which led to the buying and exchanging of land parcels to consolidate property into farms.
The New England town system has several implications for genealogists, starting with the need to determine what records are on the county level and which are on the town level. Early Massachusetts Bay towns recorded their own deeds until counties were created in 1643. Early towns on eastern Long Island also recorded their own deeds until the Duke of York’s New York proprietary required registration in Suffolk County. Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont recorded and still record deeds on the town level. Aside from deeds, the researcher should also check for early proprietor minutes on the town level. More generally, New England research requires that towns be treated as mini-counties. Thus, while counties are not as important as in the South, there are three levels of jurisdiction in New England—state, county, and town.
Some of the technical aspects of the New England land system have been well summarized:
A. Commoners and Non-Commoners…The term[s] “commoner” and “proprietor” are synonymous. “Proprietor” simply replaces “commoner” as the proper legal term.
Commoners were originally those to whom the General Court [the legislature] had made a grant of land in common for settlement, very often without giving them entire control. They formed a quasi-corporation. The right of a commoner might be conveyed in a land transaction or inherited and one who thus became entitled to a right was not necessarily entitled to vote in the town meetings when township privileges had been conferred upon the inhabitants. On the other hand, because a man was entitled to a vote in the town did not entitle him to a voice in the control of the common lands…. The land community and the political community were distinct and separate bodies.
The town could enter into transactions with the proprietors; and they in turn could make grants to the town. In plantations where the inhabitants were all commoners, the two bodies acted as one and there would be no “proprietors’ records” kept. For instance, Groton, Mass., was settled in 1655, yet there are no proprietors’ records until 1713.
As the population of the towns increased, it became necessary to protect the commoners’ rights. Hampton, now in New Hampshire, is a good example: (1) 1641—Persons who were not freemen present at town meetings; (2) 1662—Voted “that no man be considered an inhabitant, or act in town affairs but he that hath one share at least of commonage, according to the first division”; (3) 1700—Voted that no one should vote unless a freeholder and none to vote to dispose of lands, unless he is a commoner. In towns such as these, the serious researcher will generally find separate proprietors’ records either in a separate book or as the initial part of the first town book. . . .
Two ways existed for the satisfying of claims by non-commoners: (1) Increase the number of commoners; (2) Grant lands to newcomers without accompanying the rights to commonage, either to an individual by name or to all of a given class; such as Barnstable granting 4 acres to every widow.
B. Division of Common Lands . . . The valuation of a man’s estate, made from the tax-list, was the principal basis of division (Haverhill, Ipswich, Dedham, Hartford, many Connecticut River towns, settlements along Long Island Sound).
C. Restrictions Upon Alienation . . . Great care was taken to preserve the original character of the community and to control its membership. A Connecticut law of 1659 declared no inhabitants shall make sale of house and lands until put forth to the town for approval; an item in Guilford, Connecticut, Town Book refers to no one being able to sell OR purchase unless by consent of the community; Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1638 had a provision “against selling town lots to forrainers.”
D. Common Field . . . The proportions of land cultivated in common varied greatly throughout New England; largely based on necessity. Connecticut and Massachusetts laws gave authority to townsmen or selectmen, or, when there were none, to the major part of the freemen.
Common fields were found in most towns. They were formed: (1) Due to lack of means to fence separately; (2) Due to difficulty of fencing (land along the Connecticut River); (3) Due to convenience. Fences were maintained by each owner according to his share of land enclosed.
E. Home Lots, Acre Rights, Pitches . . . Home/house [p.248] lots differed in size in different New England towns, and quite often in the same town; (1) Barnstable, 6 to 12 acres; (2) Haverhill, 5 to 22 acres; (3) Groton, 10 to 20 acres. They were often proportioned as to the “quality and estate” of the possessor. . . .
Acre rights or lots indicate the share owned by any one person in the common lands. It is entirely different from home/house lots. Value varied greatly. In Billerica a 10 acre lot or right in common land was equivalent to 113 acres of upland or 12 acres of meadow. In Groton there were 60 acre rights; 20 acre rights, etc. with 755 rights in all. A 60 acre right would have entitled the owner one complete partition to 3242 acres of common land.
Pitches are rights drawn in a division which entitled the drawer to lay out a lot of land in the commons wherever he might choose.
The New Hampshire town of Bow illustrates how town divisions of land were made. In 1725, some residents of Haverhill, Massachusetts, petitioned the Massachusetts General Court (the legislature) for a town grant in the Merrimack River Valley at what is now Concord, New Hampshire. The legislature approved a town of about seven by eight miles, and the first proprietors arrived in the winter of 1726 at this new town called Pennycook. The valley was also claimed by New Hampshire, whose coastal ruling establishment in 1727 received from its legislature an overlapping grant of eighty-one square miles called Bow. Among the proprietors (each promised five hundred-acre shares) were the governor, lieutenant governor, president, and four members of the council, both the colonial secretary and the treasurer, and various members of the legislature. This was, in short, a land speculation in the guise of a town grant, far different from Pennycook and its Massachusetts farmers.
In 1728, the Massachusetts General Court granted a town called Suncook, next to Pennycook, to the heirs and survivors of an Indian expedition two years previous in which thirteen soldiers had died. Suncook, predecessor of modern Bow, was surveyed in 1729, confirmed by the Massachusetts General Court, and made its first division of land in 1730. Field lots averaging fifteen to twenty acres were laid along both sides of the Merrimack River. All houses were built on the east side. The rival New Hampshire proprietors also declared a land division on the east side of the river, the first lots being forty acres. Thus rival town proprietors granted lands.
In 1740, George II established the Massachusetts-New Hampshire line as it is today, placing Pennycook and Suncook inside New Hampshire and directing that existing property titles be honored. This ruling made the Bow proprietors the sole legal proprietors, but the ex-proprietors of Suncook had the advantage of possession. The resulting legal battles were long and expensive, going all the way to England more than once. The present modern town gained a grant of town government from New Hampshire in 1767. When the Bow proprietors ceased functioning in 1786, the town of Bow was finally free of absentee land speculators.
In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferral of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century by David Grayson Allen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).
Origin of the Land Tenure System in the United States by Marshall Harris (Ames: Iowa State College Press, 1953) For colonial land history in New England
The Town Proprietors of the New England Colonies: A Study of Their Development, Organization, Activities and Controversies, 1620–1770 by Roy Hidemichi Akagi (Philadelphia: Press of the University of Pennsylvania, 1924)
The U.S. government has sold or given away more than 1 billion acres of land (not including Alaska). In the process it granted more than 5 million patents kept in 8,978 bound volumes in the Springfield, Virginia, office of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). An even greater mass of records in the National Archives represents the paperwork granting those patents. Searching for the record of a particular land grant from the federal government requires contacting both the BLM and the National Archives. To know what to request means understanding something of how the federal government processed the paperwork.
Federal Land Grants
From 1776, when Congress promised land to German auxiliaries (sometimes incorrectly known as “Hessians”), and for a quarter of a century afterward, it experimented, mostly in Ohio, to find a workable public land policy. By 1803, when Ohio became a state, the major characteristics of the federal land system had been set:
The federal government, not the state, would dispose of the western lands which the original states had ceded, Georgia in 1802 being the last to surrender its western claims.
Before any grants were made, the Indian title had to be removed and the land surveyed in rectangular townships of six-mile squares. Some partial townships would exist due to the curvature of the earth.
The disposal of the vacant land would be handled through land offices located near settlers.
War service (at least prior to the Civil War) usually brought the veterans a right to free land.
Legally registered entry claims and military bounty land could usually be sold before a patent was obtained (homesteads could not).
Valid land titles obtained from previous French, Spanish, and British governments would be honored.
By 1880, Congress had passed more than 3,500 laws dealing with public lands.
Much of the public domain was transferred to private or state title, though not so smoothly as a description of the system might suggest. Engineering Indian cessions was often slow and deceitful; white settlers lived for years on Indian land without any legal claims to the land they cleared and farmed; land speculators amassed doubtful legal claims which they petitioned Congress to make good; private land claims under foreign title were proven with fake documents and perjury; dry lands were purchased at cut-rate “swamp” prices; timber lands and cattle ranges were “homesteaded” by frontmen acting for timber and cattle companies; and mineral lands, such as the iron deposits of the Mesabi Range in Minnesota, were acquired through bogus entrymen. When the government allowed squatters first claim on lands (preemption rights), the neighbors bearing witness for each other might testify to earlier arrival dates than were true. In short, confusion and fraud were common. Just because the land-entry paperwork adheres to formula does not mean it presents the truth.
In 1879, Congress created the U.S. Public Land Commission to take stock of past and future land policies. In addition to its general report and Donaldson’s 1,500-page history, the commission also compiled 1,300 pages of U.S. land laws.
In short, the subject of United States land law history is voluminous. In summary: Public domain lands were first sold by auction in New York City in 1787 and in Pittsburgh in 1796 but not successfully. Then, on-the-spot local land offices were created, the earliest in Ohio in 1800—the first of 362 land districts to span the continent. Newly opened lands were offered at auction, then at a set minimum price—$2 an acre from 1796 to 1820. Credit was allowed on ever-easier terms, and the minimum tract size was reduced from 640 to 320 acres. Overextension of credit and the resulting panic of 1819 caused the elimination of long-term credit in favor of eighty-acre minimums at $1.25 an acre. Congress passed many relief acts for those who still owed money under the abolished credit system, and it also gave general preemption rights in 1841.
From the 1820s, Congress became increasingly generous in giving away lands to finance military wagon roads (from 1823), canals (1827), river improvement (1828), swamp reclamation (1849), railroads (1850), colleges (1862), and desert reclamation (1894). In 1832, minimum purchases dropped to forty acres, and from 1842 to 1853, land was donated to early settlers in Florida, Oregon/Washington, and New Mexico/Arizona. The famous 1862 Homestead Act gave a settler 160 acres (80 within railroad grant areas) for living on the land for 5 years and improving it. The donation and homestead acts required the claimant to show U.S. citizenship or an already-filed declaration of intent to become a citizen, valuable information for a genealogist. Later laws increased homestead acreage in arid areas, including the Desert Land Act of 1877 for 640 acres in a dozen Western states; the Kincaid Act of 1904 for 640 acres in western Nebraska; the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 for 320 acres in seven Mountain West states; and the Stock-Raising Homestead Act of 1916 for 640 acres. Homesteading essentially ended in the 1930s, although Western “sagebrush rebellions” have offered some state lands as late as 1983. General cash sales and preemption rights had been stopped in 1891, though some sales and much leasing of federal mineral and grazing lands continue to the present.
As always, the researcher should understand the paperwork flow. After the Indian title was extinguished and private land claims, if any, were adjudicated and surveyed, the surveyor-general’s office established a principal meridian and baseline, then surveyed at six-mile intervals to create townships of thirty-six sections, each a mile square. Because many states have more than one principal meridian, the meridians are part of the legal description—for example, NW 1/4 of SE 1/4, sec. 9, T13S, R11E, Sixth P.M.
Once the land was surveyed and could be legally described, a local land office was opened, the auction was held, and land was available at the minimum price to claimants/entrymen who paid a credit installment (before 1820) or a down payment on a cash purchase. Homesteads required a very small fee. Each land office was run jointly by two officials: a registrar, who recorded entries and kept track of which tracts were claimed or still open, and a receiver, who handled the money. These officials kept daily journals and account ledgers and sent periodic summaries to the national headquarters—first the Treasury Department and, from 1812, the newly created General Land Office (GLO). The local land office kept a separate file for each entry and two indexes by area: (1) the tract book, which was a written description of each entry on sheets arranged by township and range (figure 8-5), and (2) a township plat (figure 8-6), which was a map of entries for each township showing patented tracts.
Once the entryman had fulfilled the requirements of purchase or homesteading, the local officials sent the case file (the entryman’s paperwork and the final certificate of entitlement to a patent) to GLO headquarters in Washington, which confirmed that all paperwork was in order and issued a patent (first-title deed) transferring the land from the government to the private individual (or to the states, railroads, canal companies, etc.). The GLO headquarters recorded chronologically a copy of the patent in a bound volume by state and district and stored the land-entry case file. After 30 June 1908, patents were recorded chronologically in one continuous, national series regardless of state. This series is indexed for all patentees. The new owner may then have had the patent recorded in the county deed book, or the state may have had an agreement with the GLO that the appropriate county and state authorities would be automatically informed of all patents, because the new lands were often exempt from property taxes for a set term, such as five years.
Homestead case files are richer in genealogical information than the cash, credit, and bounty-warrant files. A homestead final certificate file usually includes the homestead application, certificate of publication of intention to complete the claim, final proof of homesteading (testimony from the claimant and his or her witnesses), and a final document authorizing issuance of a patent. A certified copy of the naturalization papers, if needed for the application, may be present. The final proof documents give the claimant’s name, age, and post office address, describe the tract and the house, date the establishment of residence, give the number and relationship of the members of the family, and note citizenship, crops, acres under cultivation, and testimony of witnesses.
Not all claims—homestead and otherwise—were brought to patent. If the entryman did not obtain title by the deadline for the final charges or complete the homestead residency of five years, then the entry claim was canceled and stored, now available from the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. 20408. However, some went to state and regional federal archives. For the genealogist, these canceled case files, traceable through the tract books, are valuable records of an ancestor’s life and sometimes give clues about why the claim was never completed. The number of canceled entries is large:
Entries
Patents
%
Canceled
Homestead Act
1,968,264
783,053
60.2
Timber Act
290,300
67,382
76.8
Desert Land Act
87,247
23,984
72.5
More than 1,185,000 homestead entries were never patented but should have files containing some of the same information as patented case files, plus a date and reason for the cancellation.
Bureau of Land Management
In 1946, the GLO and the Grazing Service were consolidated into the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which today holds many GLO records or is the agency title under which the National Archives and its regional branches store GLO records—Record Group 49. The BLM (as of 1996) is divided into eastern and western states. Its working records—the tract books, plats, and patents—for all the eastern states are at the Eastern States Office, 7450 Boston Blvd., Springfield, VA 22153. The eastern states comprise all public-domain states east of the Mississippi River and all states on the river’s west bank (Louisiana to Minnesota). Most western states have their own offices; however, Washington’s is with the Portland, Oregon, office, and the Great Plains states are under adjoining states farther west. The local land offices and GLO headquarters made duplicate tract and plat books, so the researcher often has a choice of several repositories for microfilm or original records.
Each step of the process from survey to patent has left records potentially helpful to genealogists:
Survey Field Notes -
The surveyor general’s records for a state may be in the state’s land office (most common), the state archive, or the appropriate regional federal archive. Surveys have little information directly usable by genealogists; but for ancestors on the land prior to the survey, the surveyor’s field notes may supply background descriptions of the area and sometimes specific, crude drawings of homes and outbuildings on the property.
Tract Books -
In the absence of a precise legal description, the tract books can be consulted for entrymen in a township. These books have been microfilmed, and the appropriate eastern or western states offices should have sets for their regions. Some state archives, regional archives, and other local research libraries may also have microfilm. At present, the tract books are the best index to claimants and patentees in those states not yet computerized.
Township Plats -
After many years of being written on and over, the plats may be illegible, and the tract books are a better finding tool for the legal description. The plats have been microfilmed and are usually deposited in the same locations as the tract books.
Patents -
The originals for the whole public domain are in the Eastern States Office, recorded in chronological order by state and thereunder by land district up to 30 June 1908. The indexes have been explained above. The patents have been microfilmed, and the Western states’ patents have been mounted, one patent per IBM card (aperture card), allowing them to be sorted into township and range order for ease of location. Patents should be obtained from the appropriate BLM local office.
Federal patents or deeds dated from the late 1780s to 1 July 1908 are indexed for the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin in a computerized master index to patentee names. More than 1 million homestead and cash patents or deeds issued by the United States can be accessed Online at http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/Logon/Logon_Form.asp.
Indian Reservations and Preemption Rights
From 1830 to 1934, the government dissolved many Indian reservations by first allotting each Indian a tract of land, then selling the remainder. The records of such allotments are voluminous, and many have been microfilmed as Bureau of Indian Affairs agency records. For instance, the records of the Winnebago Agency, Nebraska, are in the National Archives—Central Plains Region in Kansas City, Missouri, and include land sales, 1902 to 1910; Santee acknowledgments of allotments, 1885; lists of Ponca and Santee tribe members never receiving allotments, 1936–1941, etc.
The problem of settlers claiming land before surveyors arrived was a very pressing one which Congress attempted to solve by preemption rights. That this was not a complete solution is shown by the existence of claims clubs, which were private associations sworn to enforce their members’ claims when local land was offered for sale or homesteading. Often armed and intimidating, members would attend land office auctions as a group to convince non-members not to enter lands the members claimed. Such clubs were often quite formal in organization and kept records, some of which have survived. Claims clubs may be more interesting for historians than for genealogists, but they are definitely worth searching where they exist. Claims clubs were especially numerous and active in Iowa and Minnesota and the adjoining states to the west.
Such extralegal policing of land claims existed wherever the federal government’s land title system came later than the settlers. The mining camp law of the California Gold Rush is an obvious instance of trying to avoid the violence of claim-jumping. In Utah, settlers arrived twenty-two years before the land office and were openly worried about their legal position. Brigham Young once threatened, “If they jump my claim here, I shall be very apt to give them a preemption right that will last them to the last resurrection.”
State land offices of the public domain states will not be described here. These states received title to large acreage from the federal government and in turn sold or leased it to individuals. These records are in state land offices and archives. If you suspect that your ancestor had land dealings with a state, you can write either the state archive or the state secretary of state’s office and ask where the records are. In many states, they are still held by the equivalent of a state land commissioner or by a state land board (as in Colorado).
Private Land Claims
There was a special type of federal land grant called the private land claim, wherein the American government recognized as valid certain land grants made by the earlier French, Spanish, and British governments in areas acquired by the United States after the American Revolution. These areas were the Old Northwest north of the Ohio River, the Gulf states from Florida to Louisiana, the tier of states on the west bank of the Mississippi, and the Spanish Southwest from New Mexico to California but not including Texas.
Sometimes the foreign legal titles were quite old and meticulously documented; often they were vague claims without clear bounds. Near villages it was common to find communal fields divided into long, individually owned arable strips surrounded by a communally maintained fence. Also characteristic, though not universal, were the “long lots”—narrow, adjoining tracts, each a few hundred feet wide, along a road or river and each running far back into the woods or prairie—sometimes a mile or more. The French and Spanish authorities also made larger grants, such as the square leagues common in Texas and the rancheros in California.
Barring the usual losses, the Spanish and French administrations usually kept adequate records, and land titles were recorded and preserved.
When the U.S. government assumed control of areas containing Spanish and French grants, it had to create private land claims commissions to separate the authentic and legal titles from the fraudulent and dubious. (It is said that nine hundred Kaskaskia, Illinois, claims were perjured.14) By international law, the new government was obliged to recognize the valid property titles of the previous regime.
The private land claims ruled valid by the claims commissions of the U.S. state and federal courts are first-title deeds surveyed outside the regular federal system of townships and ranges. For example, on figure 8-7, a survey of Vincennes, Indiana, the federal survey lines stop at the irregular lots and tracts of the private land claims of the old French outpost called Vincennes Common. Even today, the legal titles run back to the confirmed first-title patents of the Vincennes private claims validated by the governor of the Northwest Territory, as directed by a Congressional resolution of 1788. The legal description of this land is not in terms of sections, townships, and ranges, but in terms of the lot numbers the governor assigned to the validated and surveyed private land claims at Vincennes. The general system of private land claims, however, did not always run smoothly. Some perfectly good pre-American titles were not presented to claims commissions, engendering litigation much later.
“Private land claims” can also refer to the claims directly presented to Congress for private relief. These papers could be in different archives, depending on the administrative route taken. Claims to 1837 are recorded in U.S. Congress, The American State Papers, Class VIII, Public Lands and The American State Papers, Class IX, Claims (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1832–61. Reprint. Greenville, S.C.: Southern Historical Press), and are indexed in Phillip W. McMullin, Grassroots of America (Reprint. Greenville, S.C.: Southern Historical Press, [p.257] 1994). The National Archives has congressional records, case files, and plat maps of private claims. According to the Guide to Genealogical Research in the National Archives:
Originals of the committee reports to Congress on private land claims are among Records of the U.S. Senate, Record Group 46, and Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233. They are filed by Congress, thereunder by name of committee, and thereunder chronologically.
Committee reports on individual land claims considered from 1826 to 1876 by the two congressional committees on private land claims are collected and published in Reports of the Committees on Private Land Claims of the Senate and House of Representatives, 2 vols. (45th Cong., 3d sess. Misc. Doc. 81, serial 1836). Each volume is indexed by name of claimant or subject, but many names are omitted. There is also an “Index to Reports of Committee on Private Land Claims, House of Representatives” on pages 5–20 of House Index to Committee Reports by T.H. McKee (Y1.3:C73/2). The Congressional Serial Set provides digested summaries and alphabetical lists of private claims presented to the U.S. Congress from the 1st to 51st Congress (1789–1891).
Table 25 in the Guide shows which congressional documents list private claims brought before Congress. Major university libraries and other large research libraries are usually repositories for such government publications, and many of the early publications have been microfilmed.
Private land claims are also found in various court records, because disapproved claims could be taken to court. In fact, Congress, in abolishing particular claims commissions, routinely authorized the holders of unsettled claims to prosecute their cases through the courts.
For further reading, see Paul W. Gates, History of Public Land Law Development (Washington, D.C.: Public Land Law Review Commission, 1968), 87–119; his “Private Land Claims in the South,” Journal of Southern History 22 (1956): 183–204; Louis Pelzer, “The Private Land Claims of the Old Northwest Territory,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics 12 (1914): 363–93; T.P. Martin, “The Confirmation of French and Spanish Land Titles in the Louisiana Purchase” (M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1914); Lemont K. Richardson, “Private Land Claims in Missouri,” Missouri Historical Review 50 (1955–56): 132–44, 271–86, 387–99; Clark S. Knowlton, ed., “Spanish and Mexican Land Grants in the Southwest: A Symposium,” Social Science Journal 13 (October 1976): 1–63.
Related Reading:
Ray Allen Billington and Martin Ridge, Western Expansion, A History of the American Frontier, 5th ed. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1982). It is a masterful summary of American frontier history with an extensive bibliography.
John F. Vallentine, “Histories of the American Frontier: A Series,” Genealogical Journal 6 (1977): 200–05.
Donaldson, Thomas. The Public Domain: Its History With Statistics. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1970 reprint of 1884 GPO original. House Misc. Doc. 45 pt. 4, 47th Cong., 2nd Sess.
Gates, Paul W. History of Public Land Law Development. Washington, D.C.: Public Land Law Review Commission, 1968.
Hibbard, Benjamin Horace. A History of the Public Land Policies. New York: Peter Smith, 1939.
Robbins, Roy Marvin. Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain, 1776–1970. 2nd ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976.
Rohrbough, Malcolm J. The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1990.
Treat, Payson Jackson. The National Land System, 1785–1820. New York: E.B. Treat, 1910.
Lawrence B. Lee, “American Public Land History: A Review Essay,” Agricultural History 55 (1981): 284–99.
Bureau of Land Management, Public Land Bibliography (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Land Management, 1962).
Dictionary Catalog of the National Agricultural Library, 1862–1965, 73 vols. (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1965–70)
Department of the Interior, Catalog of the United States Geological Survey Library, 24 vols. plus a first supplement of 11 vols. and a second of 4 (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1964, 1972–74).
U.S. Public Land Commission, Laws of the United States of a Local or Temporary Character and Exhibiting the Entire Legislation of Congress Upon Which the Public Land Titles in Each State and Territory Have Depended (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1881), House Exec. Doc. no. 47, pts. 2–3, 46th Cong., 3rd sess., serial no. 1976.
Bureau of Land Management, Manual of Instructions for the Survey of the Public Lands of the United States (Washington: Department of the Interior, 1973), Technical Bulletin 6.
E. Kay Kirkham, The Land Records of America and Their Genealogical Value (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1964)
Richard S. Lackey, “The Genealogists’ First Look at Federal Land Records,” Prologue 9 (Spring 1977): 43–45; A brief background of federal land records
Natchez Trace Genealogical Society; and W. Frank Meek, “Federal Land Office Records,” University of Colorado Law Review 43 (1971–72): 177–97.
Henry Putney Beers, Spanish & Mexican Records of the American Southwest: A Bibliographical Guide to Archive and Manuscript Sources (Tucson: University of Arizona Press and the Tucson Corral of the Westerners, 1979), 44–60, 141–56, 247–68, 328–39. The Texas General Land Office today has a series of sixty-nine volumes of Spanish and Mexican records. The Spanish land system is discussed in detail for Texas, New Mexico (with Colorado), Arizona, and California
The granting of military bounty land in the United States to encourage enlistments or reward previous service began in colonial times, but its legislative heyday was from 1788 to 1855, though claims were still being received by the federal government in the 1960s. Genealogists find bounty-land records especially attractive because they serve the dual role of locating persons in time and place and of proving military service. Applications sometimes contain a wealth of information, especially when heirs claimed lands.
Colonial legislatures gave land for military service, such as for the Narragansett campaign of King Philip’s War, 1675 to 1676, but these were mostly private acts passed to reward meritorious service to the colony. In 1701, Virginia passed an act promising two hundred acres free of quitrents for twenty years to those who would make armed settlements on the Indian frontier. The Crown’s proclamation of 1763 ordered the colonies to give bounty land for service in the French and Indian War to “reduced” (indigent) officers and to British Army privates mustered out in the colonies who intended to remain there. This did not include militia units. In 1776, Congress promised so-called “Hessian deserters” fifty acres but had few takers. Also in 1776, Congress promised bounty land to soldiers of the Continental line, with privates and noncommissioned officers to get one hundred acres, captains three hundred acres, and other ranks various amounts. States that likewise promised or afterwards gave bounty lands were Connecticut, Massachusetts (with Maine), New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Revolutionary War Bounty Land Grants Awarded by State Governments (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1996), is a master index to approximately 35,000 persons named in the grants from these nine states. The states that did not give revolutionary war bounty lands were New Hampshire, Rhode island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Delaware.
North Carolina was the most generous, giving 640 acres (a square mile) to a private in the Continental line. Maryland gave the smallest amount, fifty acres to a private, but the state had very little western land to give. Figure 8-8 and table 8-1 show the locations of the military reserves and the acreage for each rank for each state and the federal government. Massachusetts grants were in Maine but were in no specific reserve. Privates who got a one hundred-acre warrant from the federal government were not eligible for a Massachusetts state grant. Soldiers of the Continental line from other states could take both the federal and their state land bounties. Paul Gates, History of Public Land Law Development, discusses aspects of various state grants. Gates states, without elaborating, that Connecticut gave bounty land; but this seems to refer to the Fire Lands in Ohio granted to individuals burned out in the revolution rather than to grants to soldiers. Virginia is discussed below because its bounty-land records are widely scattered; some are in the National Archives.
Congress was slow to redeem its promise of land for its soldiers. In 1788, it directed that bounty-land warrants be issued to those applying. But the U.S. Military District in Ohio, the only federal lands where federal revolutionary warrants could be used until 1830, did not open until 1796—a full fifteen years after victory at Yorktown. A planned second federal reserve at the southern end of Illinois was not created; instead, the district in Ohio was enlarged. The Ohio Company and John Cleves Symmes in 1787 and 1788 had purchased millions of Ohio acres on credit from Congress and were permitted to pay one-seventh of the price in federal bounty-land warrants. Therefore, land offices of the two speculations accepted some federal warrants, the earliest locales where they could be used. Congress also created three military reserves for veterans of the War of 1812, but there were no federal reserves after these three in Illinois, Arkansas, and Missouri. Warrants usable in the Virginia and U.S. military districts in Ohio were made redeemable by scrip acts in 1830 and 1832, respectively, in any GLO land offices in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. In 1842, all federal bounty-land warrants were made good for purchases at any GLO land office.
The 1788 act stipulated that warrants were assignable, meaning the soldier could sell his warrant and not wait to take the land. This created an instant market in bounty warrants and allowed land speculators to accumulate large quantities of warrants and land. Paul Gates shows that less than one soldier (or his heirs) in ten got land by using his warrant under any federal bounty-land act. Because few soldiers actually used their warrants to patent land, patents and land-entry case files are much less valuable than the warrants and the warrant applications for locating a soldier’s military service. Most soldiers sold their rights, using the back of the warrant to assign it to the buyer, who might in turn assign the warrant to another buyer. Sometimes the assignment left the buyer’s name blank, to be filled in by the last purchaser. The warrant certificates issued to Mexican War veterans were folios, with the insides and back unprinted so they could be used for assignments.
The warrant market was big business, especially when warrants were no longer restricted to military reserve lands. Major brokerage firms dealt extensively in warrants, buying in the eastern states and selling to western land brokers and settlers. Financial newspapers in the boom years of the 1850s frequently carried price quotations. The government set a price ceiling from 1820 by charging a flat $1.25 per acre for most of its lands. The average market price peaked at about $1.20 an acre in 1854–55 for 160-acre warrants, just before the market was flooded by the act of 1855.17 More warrants were used in Iowa than in any other state, and it is estimated that half of Iowa was purchased with bounty-land warrants.
The federal government gave no bounty land for service after 1855, but Union veterans of the Civil War received special homestead rights: in 1870, the right to claim 160 acres within railroad grant areas (other homesteaders got only 80), and in 1872, the right to deduct the length of their war service from the five-year residency needed to prove a homestead.
To get a federal bounty-land warrant it was necessary, under any act from 1788 to 1855, for the soldier or heirs to apply. The warrant applications are in Record Group 15 in the Military Service Records section of the National Archives. The surrendered warrants (those used to obtain land) are in land-entry case files of the patentees in Record Group 49 in the National Records Center, Suitland, Maryland. The case file categories are briefly described in Harry P. Yoshpe and Philip P. Brower, Preliminary Inventory of the Land-Entry Papers of the General Land Office (cited earlier), pp. 7–9, known as Inventory No. 22. The patents, obtained by using land warrants, were like any other GLO patents. The official copies are in the Eastern States Office of the BLM in Springfield, Virginia. In seeking the various records related to a federal bounty-land warrant, the researcher should try to learn the warrant number, the acreage claimed, and the act used—for example, warrant no. 8256, forty acres, act of 1852. This information could be unnecessary because the National Archives may handle the searching, but having it in full or in part allows for more precise requests, thereby increasing the chances of success. The best source is the bounty-land application files.
(Richmond: Virginia Surveyors Foundation and The Virginia Association of Surveyors, 1979), a book worth reading by anyone interested in Southern indiscriminate surveys. 