At 15:21 -0500 on 1/15/1999, SharonN449@aol.com mailed Land Rush Participants: > The Southwest Oklahoma Genealogical Society offers tract book > searches of the > Oklahoma land rush records. I ordered one on my great grandfather, Frances > Marion Bruce, and yesterday they replied that they had searched all > 72 volumes > of the Tract Books and found no trace of him. Tract books are (today) Bureau of Land Management indexes to the public lands Master Title Plats. Prior records were kept by its predecessor, the Government Land Office. > Is there somewhere else to look. Are there other tract books. Can anyone > shed some light for me or steer me to other sources? Thanks for > your help. It is possible that the person reviewing the books overlooked something. It is possible the person annotating the land records at the time failed properly to record the information. It is possible that after this passage of time, the necessary book is lost or misplaced. As recently as 1964 in Alaska an enterprising person or two discovered an error in the BLM records and entered 160 acres as a homestead that were shown on the Master Title Plat as withdrawn for public water supply protection. In fact the Land Order in question did not include those acres, but the Plat had been drawn showing them included. Your situation could be a similar error made long ago. I am sure the land rush generated a massive amount of record keeping in a short period of time, creating a great risk of error. I ran into another situation once where a survey was drawn in Colorado and approved in Washington and made a part of the land office records, even thought the surveyor lied, had never set foot near the land, and spent his fees in a bar in Denver. The present relatively careful keeping of public records is not that old and traditional. I know, for example, that corruption was widespread in the West in the 1870's, and did not just affect Indians. Ted ================================================= mailto:egburton@valint.net Do I have a Y2K Problem? No, I've got a Mac. I've got a Y29.94K Problem! Ne molesti te deprimant ... resist the Redmondian Borg! Semper Mac!