tarantulac@aol.com wrote: >I found online, the Index for land grants/patents/deeds at the Maryland Archives.? I printed all the cards that contained the land owner, libre, folio, with additional information about certificate and side notes about patentees, guarantors, etc. ________ What index did you find? There's the old patent Index 55, by tract name, and another (index 54) by grantee name, both sets of card images. But these same have been transcribed/abstracted into plats.net, which is searchable electronically, making the cards "obsolete", in the sense of the "best" way to chase them down. Neither of these indexes includes deeds, the index and imaged pages for which are separately accessible (by county) within mdlandrec.net. The patent records themselves are not on-line (though their indexes, as above, are [by county]), but almost every patent after about 1710 is also represented by an original Certificate of Survey, which is on-line (in the county of record at the time the survey was made, not necessarily the modern county). This contains the essential data on the survey, reflecting almost all of the useful stuff that one would find in the associated patent. If no Certificate is available on-line, you're at the mercy of circumstance. Many later deed conveyances for properties recapitulate word-for-word the original patent description, so you need not, in such a case, actually have to order the patent document from the Archives. If you need the original, you need to order from the Archives. As to whether or not the patent description might be found in an abstract somewhere, it depends on the county. In Somerset, Worcester and Wicomico, no such abstracts exist. I have all of those here within my database, but, well, 18 is a bunch. John Lyon