Thought some of you might be interested if your research is in this area: The following article is from Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and is copyright 1999 by Richard W. Eastman. It is re-published here with the permission of the author. - California Land Patent Information Is Now Online The following is an announcement from the Bureau of Land Management: Historic California Land Patent Information has been published on the Internet by the Bureau of Land Management. This information is a valuable resource to the genealogist, historian or as a starting point for land title searches. The web site lists over 260,000 individual land patent recipients in the state of California. The data is organized geographically by county. Using Adobe's Acrobat plug-in with your browser, you can search county .pdf files to find individuals, and determine date, location, and under which law the land was obtained from the government. Also, compressed spreadsheets can be downloaded and manipulated using Microsoft Excel. The data are not "Official Government Records" but are a useful research tool. Instructions for obtaining Official Records from the Bureau of Land Management and the National Archives are provided. Besides the value to the genealogist, when combined with Master Title Plats available from BLM, information can be extracted to make maps showing periods of settlement, location of railroad grants, homesteads, mineral lands, and Mexican Land Grants, to name just a few possibilities. A page using Bakersfield, California as a case study, provides some examples of additional uses of this data. This site contains high quality primary records that are valuable to genealogists. The site includes a name index for every patentee in the State of California. Once you find the individual, you note the county where the land is located and then select the link to that county. All of the county information is in Adobe Acrobat format. This website is available at: http://www.ca.blm.gov/landpatents/