Ignore USA land records at your own cost. For genealogists, land records are one of the basic building blocks of research in the USA. Many land records were made before census records and where there is missing census data you may be able to discover your ancestor using land records. Don’t be afraid to dig in and visit you local records office on a learning trip just to get used to how the records are organized. State archives are also a good place to discover land record indexes and the actual old records. You are going to want to examine both grants and deeds (more about those below).
Some land records can be very detailed and provide clues to other genealogy records. By studying land records you may be able to find clues as to what your ancestor may have done for a living and also their economic status. You can also get some idea of their neighbors if you look at deed or grant records as a group. Digging deep into the information on land records of your ancestors and their neighbors can point you to where they may have immigrated from and if anyone else travel with them. It is also just plain exciting to find the land that your ancestors owned and then try to actually find where it was either on a map or in person.
You may be able to find birth dates and death dates for your ancestors but wouldn’t you like to know more? Wouldn’t you like to know who they were and how they lived? A bunch of dates and names won’t tell you much about that kind of personal information. Land records may provide some of this extra information, which you will eventually want to know.
Many genealogists shy away from land records because they are not the easiest thing to research and many of the old deeds or grants are hard to read. But we have found that with practice you can read old writing much better and there is some fascinating stuff in the writing of deeds. Finding out who the witnesses to deeds were many times leads to other relatives. Many court houses have deeds well indexed. It’s like looking for a buried treasure every time.
When examining land records you will come across two different types. There are the records that were created when a federal authority passed land to an individual or group of individuals (as in grants) and there were different records created when land was transferred from a person or group to another person or group (as in a deed). You are going to want to learn about these types of land records, and how they were made, before setting out on a search for them. Indeed, with any genealogy research it is best to learn about what you are going to research first so that you have some picture in your mind of what you may find and at what location you may find it.
A hardback book we have in our library and that we recommend is, E. Wade Hone’s Land & Property Research in the United States. Here is a place to buy it:
You can do some preliminary land record research on the internet as well. Here are some of the better sites to both do research and learn about land records research. Just do it!
US Land & Property Research Intro.
http://users.arn.net/~billco/uslpr.htm
US Bureau of Land Management
http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/
DeedMapper Software
http://www.directlinesoftware.com/
What Land Records are in the National Archives?
http://www.archives.gov/genealogy/land/
What are Land Case Files and What is in Them?
http://www.archives.gov/publications/general-info-leaflets/67.html
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