Park Genealogical Books-
Research Notes

From the specialists in genealogy and local history for Minnesota and the surrounding area

Finding Clues in Land Records

With a Minnesota land description, a researcher can use both old and more modern maps to locate family property. A typical description provides township, range and section (T, R, and S) numbers and can be found on assessment rolls, in wills, or deeds and mortgages. Though the township names can change over time, the land description remains constant.

A typical land description can appear to be a somewhat scary set of abbreviations. Decoding is simple, as it begins with the boundaries of the specific piece of property and expands to its position within a grid of larger and larger geographic areas. If your ancestor was the first owner of the property, that is, it was purchased from the Federal Government, you can look up that transfer on-line at the General Land Office Records website. Subsequent land transfers are in county records.

For example, Benedict Drexler purchased land on June 1, 1861, described as "S1/2SW S5 T110-N R31-W, 5th P[rincipal] M[eridian], Brown [County].' We start at the end of the description, recognizing that the land is in Brown County, west of the Mississippi River. (The fifth principal meridian follows the river with the land to the east measured from the fourth PM.)

Surveyors worked in six-mile blocks, measuring from the meridians. The place on the grid where the township and range designations line up is currently known as Milford Township. Within the block are typically 36 sections, snaking from "1" at the upper left corner, and ending with "36" at the lower right corner of the block. Drexler's land is in Section 5, revealing that it is located in the top tier of sections, toward the eastern side of the township.

A section typically includes 640 acres, and many purchases were made for quarter sections or 160 acres. Sections have directional identification. Drexler purchased S1/2SW or the southern half of the southwest quarter of Milford township.

Now that the exact location of the land is known, a researcher can trace what happened to the land. Land features, such as proximity to water, tax records, identification of the neighbors (e.g., who bought the northern half? how far away was the church the family attended? how near were the in-laws?), and more provide new possibilities for family research. And even more fun - the original survey maps done in preparation for the land sale are on-line through the GLO website listed above.

Minnesota boasts the first published landowner atlas for any state, A.T. Andreas' Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Minnesota, published in 1874. Subscribers who purchased an atlas had their names included, along with the year they arrived in Minnesota and where they came from. Andreas' salesmen went back to each patron, and sold pictures, illustrations of farmsteads and businesses, and biographical sketches. The Andreas atlas can be a valuable research tool to find early Minnesotans. It has been digitized and is available through the Minnesota Digital Library. There are several county atlases available through this site as well.

Only one other statewide atlas with landowners has been published, and that was in 1916, by Hixson. Both this atlas and the Andreas have been microfilmed, which makes them available to a wider audience through the Minnesota Historical Society. Ask the reference librarian at your local public library to get them for you through interlibrary loan.

Ancestry.com recently announced a new database of historic landowner and reference atlases. There is at least once for every county, though most were published in the twentieth century. You can find those for your counties of interest through their database index.

No one location has all the landowner maps that have been published. Minnesota Landowner Maps and Atlases by Mary Hawker Bakeman is an annotated bibliography of wall maps, atlases, reprints, indexes, and microforms, by county, with the library locations where copies are held. The two major map libraries in Minnesota are the Minnesota Historical Society and the John Borchert Map Library at Wilson Library on the University of Minnesota Minneapolis West Bank campus. It also includes a full description of the American Rectangular Land Survey System. With this volume you can help track down the maps you need to bracket the dates your ancestor spent in a particular location within Minnesota.

Whether you have to backtrack from a landowner map to the legal description or get the legal description from a county court house, land purchase records may provide where your ancestors lived before moving here, and land sale records may provide names and relationships through the land transfers. Don't neglect these links in your research!

Check the Park Genealogical Books on-line catalog for resources for your county(ies) of interest!

© 2009 Park Genealogical Books, Roseville MN

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