I'm surprised at the difficulty of establishing orientation of plats. In my work with South Carolina plats I had no sense of an orientation problem even though most plats don't provide the north direction and even then you don't know if it was magnetic or true north. It was normal practice for the DS to label the metes and bounds of a line from left to right even when standing upside down relative to the page. If you simply pick a corner to the left of a label in the direction of writing (say N45E, 25C) and plot it you usually have the correct orientation. Sometimes clerks and surveyors made mistakes, so things don't always turn out right. Jim McConnell, jfmdem@juno.com

Jim, Thanks for the tip! This helped. Jim Barrett Bedford, TX parino@flash.net Barrett Surname DNA Project Powell Surname DNA Project -----Original Message----- From: James F McConnell [mailto:jfmdem@juno.com] Sent: Friday, October 03, 2003 6:22 AM To: DEED-MAPPER-USERS-L@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: [DMU] How to enter a plot I'm surprised at the difficulty of establishing orientation of plats. In my work with South Carolina plats I had no sense of an orientation problem even though most plats don't provide the north direction and even then you don't know if it was magnetic or true north. It was normal practice for the DS to label the metes and bounds of a line from left to right even when standing upside down relative to the page. If you simply pick a corner to the left of a label in the direction of writing (say N45E, 25C) and plot it you usually have the correct orientation. Sometimes clerks and surveyors made mistakes, so things don't always turn out right. Jim McConnell, jfmdem@juno.com ============================== To join Ancestry.com and access our 1.2 billion online genealogy records, go to: http://www.ancestry.com/rd/redir.asp?targetid=571&sourceid=1237