For those who are newcomers to our hobby, it has been said that 90% of the land on this continent was first described by the measurements called "metes and bounds"; that meaning by lines between monuments such as trees, piles of stones, creek banks, roads and prominet land features. Thus one of the boundaries to your tract might be "...from a giant oak in the ne corner of the land of Smith to the mill-house road, thence southeasterly along that road to Indian Creek....etc." The other (and usually sometime later) means of describing land that had NOT previously been platted was by "courses and distances." Such a description might read. From an iron pin in the northeast corner of the land known as the Peter Smith tract described in Deed Vol. 6, p 4., thence south 10 degrees west 183 feet to county road #650, then along the north side of that right-of-way a distance of 125 feet to the west edge of the Indian Creek...." As boundary questions arose, land was sold or mortgaged, and surveyors appeared at the edges of settlement, the old metes and bounds descriptions were reduced to courses and distances, and thus much more accuracy and precision came to all the settlers. Though such programs as AniMap do a great job in drawing "courses and distances" descriptions, they are MUCH less adaptable to "metes and bounds" since there, the direction in degrees is but seldom given. As someone said, if your part of the country has the wonderful USGS 7.5 minute Quadrangles ("topos";check with the Chamber of Comerce or any surveyor), by all means gain such of those as needed to include your ancestral tract. > Sometimes I think the old protractor and ruler method are better than computers. I did the same kind of drawing and land searches of neighbors several years ago and found several surprises and solved a 20 year old mystery. Surveyors using pole measurements were not stupid. One pole = 16.5 feet. One mile was 320 poles. So, to get the area in acres (if a rectangle) multiply one side by another (in poles) and divide by 160. If not a rectangle, use the old geometry and trig formulas. Use a dashed line to indicate creeks you can't figure, but with the math you can usually figure how much land is on the side with the creek. You may already know this, but if not, I hope it helps. > > Just out of curiosity - has anyone ever used any software for drawing up > tracts of land from deed/patent descriptions? I used a ruler and protractor > to try to draw it all to scale, but I found it really frustrating when the > descriptions included phrases like "down the creek as it meanders to the > beginning". How far was that? Where was that creek? Which way did it go? > It's not on any map. Oh, no! Not to a river where the line meanders down > that some indefinite distance too! How would software cope with something > like that? Can it use the estimated acres and the other surveyed lines to > mathematically estimate how long those vague meandering lines should be? > > > > Bob Jordan > jorbob@msn.com > > > ==== VA-SOUTHSIDE Mailing List ==== > USGenWeb Archives Census Project > http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/census/ > > > ============================== > Join the RootsWeb WorldConnect Project: > Linking the world, one GEDCOM at a time. > http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com >