Between the onset of colonization of the Americas and the late 1800's, large tracts of land were added to what is now the the United States by treaty, purchase, war or annexation. As the nation grew, the government saw the wisdom in creating incentives for settlement of the new territories. It also realized significant revenue from the sale of these lands. These incentives have taken many forms, during the growth of our country, including public domain land auctions as early as 1796 and land office sales from 1800 onward. From 1820 onward, Congress authorized increasingly generous land sales and giveaways to finance the building of military roads, canals, railroads, and so on. From 1842 to 1853 land was donated outright to settlers in what is now Oregon and Washington, New Mexico, Arizona and Florida. In 1862 the Homestead Act gave settlers homesteads of 160 acres at no cost, as long as they lived on it for a period of 5 years and improved it. Numerous later laws created incentives for settling in more arid and difficult areas. The Desert Land Act of 1877, the Kincaid Act of 1904 and the Stock-Raising Homestead Act of 1916 are examples of these later incentives.

One of the principal early acts of this kind was "An Act Making Further Provision for the Sale of Public Lands", which was passed by Congress on the 24th of April, 1820. Under this Act, homesteaders were allowed to buy tracts of land, with an 80-acre minimum, at $1.25 per acre. Upon application and payment for this land, the applicant was granted a deed from the government, called a "Land Patent". When the applicant sold the land, it was sold by regular land deed, as almost all properties are sold today. If the applicant had been in government service, either as a civil servant or in the military service, ownership of the land was granted by warrant, at no cost, and a "Warrantee Deed" was issued, instead of the "Patent Deed".

The Act of 1820 covered a large area of the United States, as it was in 1820, including the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin. From the inception of the Act, over 2 million land grants were made.

Each grant was made by issuance of a Patent Letter Certificate which contained the name of the grantee, the legal description of the property granted, the date of the grant and other information.

Many of you who have (or think you may have) ancestors in any of these states will be delighted to learn that the Bureau of Land Management (the descendant of the General Land Office) has compiled a database of the 2 million or so patent and warrantee grants made under the 1820 Act and has posted that database on the World Wide Web. This site provides a database and image access to more than two million federal land title records for the Eastern Public Land States, dating back to 1820. The database can be searched using information contained in the Patent Description, such as the Patentee's (or the Warrantee's) last name and first name, county, state, and the document number. You can also search by information contained in the Legal Land Description, such as the Section number, Township number, and/or the Range number and direction.

You can find this site at:

http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/

When you go to this site, you will see a space where you must enter your zip code (for demographic purposes only) and a button which will take you to the Patent Search Page. On that page, you will be allowed to choose the state you wish to search. Choosing the state will take you to the search page for that state, where you can enter any or all of the types of the data shown above (name, county, etc.). You can broaden your search by broadening your criteria; for example, entering only the surname for a county will pull up a list of every person with that surname who was granted a land patent in the county or state in question. This can aid you in finding ancestors you may not have known about.

There are two buttons at the bottom of the search page; one labeled "Genealogical Search" and one labeled "Title Search". The button labeled "Genealogical Search" will pop up a list of every claim by every person of that name in the area being searched and will show all the variants of that name (for example, a search for "Grant, Abram" turned up patents granted to Abram Grant, Abram I. Grant and Abram J. Grant). Each entry shows the Patentee name, the signature date, the document number and the accession number (the document number of the actual signed certificate). The button named "Title Search" will pop up a list of all the legal descriptions matching the criteria you entered and will show the Section, Township, Range, Meridian and Accession Number.

In addition, for each record that is shown, using either button, in the database, you can view or download an image of the actual document granting the patent. You can then print the document, add the image to your family documents or use it in any other way you wish. This is a wonderful piece of primary evidence to add to your file. It gives the exact legal description of the land your ancestor owned, the date they acquired it and other useful information. And having a holographic (exact) copy of a document like this is a real treat.

Better than that, you can order certified copies of any of these documents from the BLM for $ 1.50 for the first copy of a grant and $ .50 for each additional copy of the grant. They'll send them to you on your choice of paper or parchment. And you can order them right online using the government's own super-secure web ordering utility.

Try these sites; I think you'll find them useful and informative. We'll continue our search, next month, for useful database information available on the Internet. Until then, Good Hunting!!

© 1998 by Byron C. Bray. This, and all "Computers and Genealogy" articles, are copyright Byron C. Bray and may be copied for personal use but may NOT be reprinted without the permission of the author. Contact: byron.bray@cmug.com