Tips and Tools: Mapping Land Patents

Link: http://www.earthpoint.us/townships.aspx
Notes: Free!

Earthpoint provides a tool for converting U. S. land patent descriptions to latitude and longitude coordinates. It is designed to work with Google Earth which is a nifty program (+) but it requires a download (-). Fortunately, this webpage will also just spit out the latitude and longitude and you can easily plug that into an online mapping program in order to find out where an ancestor's land was.

We recently posted about how to find land patents in the BLM's online database. The earthpoint website asks for the Legal Land Description identifiers given on the land patent. Plug in those values and the program will spit out coordinates relating to the midpoint and corners of the land section. Note, that your ancestors may have only gotten part of the section, but this quick calculator will get you close to the land location.



Once you have the coordinates, you can use an online mapping program to find the current location. Google maps may be the easiest, just paste the coordinates into the search box and hit the "Search Maps" button to get a map. You can also search mapquest by coordinates at this site.





For my target example of Thomas Lincoln, in Illinois, I am pretty sure this is the land patent of President Lincoln's father - the map shows that the patent location matches up with the Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site of Illinois.

Instant Gratification: BLM Federal Land Patent Search

Link: http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/Logon/Logon_Form.asp
Notes: Free

If you have an early land owner in your family, they may have purchased or been awarded that land from the government. The Bureau of Land Management has an online system that allows you to search for original land patents.

The database includes 38 states - not the original 13 colonies or their territories or Hawaii.

After giving your zipcode, you will be asked to choose a state and provide at least a last name. After hitting the search button, a list of names and locations of the patents comes up. Clicking on a name of interest provides a description of the land patent, the land location, and an image of the document.

For an example, I have entered the name Thomas Lincoln and searched in Illinois:



After hitting the search button only one entry for Thomas Lincoln comes up.


This listing shows a patent was issued for land in Coles county in 1838.When you click his name, watch for the four tabs that you can cycle through to get more information, including a description of the patent and land, as well as an image of the actual document:



In following posts we will talk about how to locate the land and what bonus information you can sometimes find in these records.

Tips and Tools: Date Calculators

link: http://www.timeanddate.com/date/duration.html

Most genealogy programs will tell you the amount of time between two dates, but that software is not always handy. Here are a few online tools that can calculate the time between, say, a birthdate and a marriage.

The date calculator at timeanddate.com lets you type in two dates and get the difference between them.

The Pro Genealogists also have a nice calculator that lets you calculate a date of birth from a date of an event and an age, as may be given in an obituary.

Tips and Tools: Using Wikipedia to learn about places

Wikipedia can be a useful tool for learning about where your ancestors lived. Wikipedia frequently has information about the location, county, history and demographics of towns and cities. A quick Wikipedia search for Baldwin, WI reveals that it is located in St. Croix County about 30 miles from Minneapolis, MN, that it had a population of 2667 in 2000, and that it was founded in 1871 and was originally known as "Clarkesville". Looking at the entry for a county can provide useful information about the history of the county and its formation. For St. Croix County, we learn that the the county was originally established in 1840 as a part of the Wisconsin Territory before being divided and taking its current shape with Wisconsin statehood in 1848.

Tips & Tools: WorldCat

Link: http://www.worldcat.org/
Notes: Free

Back in the day, when you wanted to find out whether your local library had a particular book, you were sent to the card catalog. WorldCat works on this same idea, only on a grander scope. It is a website that is designed as a search engine for all of the world's libraries. Simply type the name of a book or other material int o worldcat's search box, provide your zipcode and it will tell you what libraries near you have this resource. This is a great way to find out where to borrow materials and it can also lead you to free information online.

WorldCat is a great resource for locating any book, magazine or journal you might want to borrow for your family history research. After checking WorldCat, I was pleased to find that the Atlanta Public Library had a copy of Loretto Szucs' (1996) Chicago and Cook County : a guide to research. Maybe even more convenient, though, is that world cat can also point you to books that are available online. Many libraries have begun to scan in old books. The copyright has expired on many old books that family historians may be interested in, and so many of these can be found online.

For example, the National Archives has an article from 1995 posted about sources to check for people who served in the civil war navy. They refer to two indexes of people who served: Lewis R. Hamersly, General Register of the United States Navy and Marine Corps, 1792-1892 (1900); and Edward W. Callaban, List of Officers of the Navy of the United States and of the Marine Corps from 1775 to 1900 (1901, reprinted 1969). The full text of versions of both of these sources can be found free online through worldcat.

http://www.worldcat.org/title/general-register-of-the-united-states-navy-and-marine-corps-arranged-in-alphabetical-order-for-one-hundred-years-1782-to-1882-including-volunteer-officers-with-a-sketch-of-the-navy-from-1775-to-1798/oclc/468858494

and

http://www.worldcat.org/title/list-of-officers-of-the-navy-of-the-united-states-and-of-the-marine-corps-from-1775-to-1900-comprising-a-complete-register-of-all-present-and-former-commissioned-warranted-and-appointed-officers-of-the-united-states-navy-and-of-the-marine-corps-regular-and-volunteer/oclc/262831170

The Big Websites

We are assuming that most people interested in family history online are already familiar with the big document search engines. So, I will go through them and their resources only briefly here. In the future if a particular feature or database that is noteworthy, we will talk about it in detail.

The Biggies:
Ancestry.com - $
Family Search - Free
Family Search Record Search - Free and amazing original documents
Footnote - $
World Vital Records -$