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.
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