Historic U. S. Land Ownership Maps

 Some of you may have seen and many of you may not have seen county maps with names of land owners indicated with tiny boxes.  In my area of research, New York State, I believe every county has them.  At one time the Sullivan County Historical Society had a large, wall-size copy at their building in Hurleyville.  

I've spent a few hours over the past couple of days reading background information about them.  Who made the maps?  Why were they made?  What was the method of dividing the plats on the maps?

I can only go just so far into the subject of surveying when my interest starts to fade and my head starts to spin.  But, it's an important topic because drawing borders has huge and many ramifications: politically, socially and historically.  

I'm not going to reiterate the details about the Land Ownership Maps here because there are other web sites that have already done a better job of describing them than I can.  I'll just supply a few links and describe a few things about them that relate to my family history research.

You can find many of the maps on Ancestry.  They will give you an idea of where your ancestor lived mid-1800s.  You will need to follow up with the town or county about the specifics of their plat number, if you want that.

The Atlas of Historical County Boundaries will show you, with animation, how boundaries have changed over time.  This reference will be added to my Links page.  

To find out more about how these maps and atlases came to be, you can begin with Land Ordinance of 1785 which may lead you further to the Public Land Survey System  which was far as I was interested.

The map pictured is of Debruce, New York, 1875, where some of my ancestors lived.  It made it possible for me to find out where they lived.  I have a few others that I paid for copies from the Maps Division of the New York Public Library that gave me locations of other ancestors in Sullivan County.  I used the censuses to give me the general area where they lived then found the maps.  The maps aren't clear, to me, about the specific plats they owned.  That requires visiting the county or town offices where the plat books are kept and some research and asking some questions.

The thing I find interesting, when I did visit a county office, was reading the description of a lot.  The metes and bounds system  which, to my mind, is completely absurd was used in surveying.  It uses natural things like rocks, trees and streams, as reference points for measuring boundaries.  All of those things can change; even rocks can move.

The other thing I found in that visit was that the last person owning family land that I was looking for was Nettie Beismer who has long been deceased.  There was no indication of what happened to the lot after she died.  I believe that the State seized lands, under Eminent Domain, for the watershed there.  Since then, some of those lands have been sold off.  Owners of private property lands taken under eminent domain are supposed to be compensated at fair market value.  I wonder if that happened and who was compensated for the properties in Debruce.  There were several families; namely Beismers, Vandermarks and Hogancamps, who might have had lands seized.  Among those three (3) families there were several hundred acres.

What I've been Working on:

• I've been working on improving individual profiles @ WikiTree that are part of the Beismer and Wormuth name studies.  I'll report on those projects again soon.
• I've been adding profiles to both studies.
• I've been working on clearing "suggestions", meaning problems with profiles I manage @ WikiTree.
• I've been working on improving profiles in other projects I'm a member of @ WikiTree.
• I'm about to plan a couple of day trips into New York State for research.
• I scanned a bunch of photos I posted in various places on Facebook so they can be see and enjoyed by other family members.  I now have to put them in proper places in my photo collection so I can find them again both the print and the digital copies.

Thinking about all of you...plan for your retirement; have something that you really want to do -- like I do this -- when you retire.  I'm as busy now as I was when I was working and enjoying myself almost every day.  I don't get much housework done though; but I live alone (I probably should put that online) and I don't really care.  😃

                                

From Time to Time

 From time to time an exciting find.

I wasn't even looking.  I was looking for anything I could find about Peter Wormuth who lived in Callicoon and was married to Grace Deighton Ramsey and, previously, to whom the family knows as Harriet Barecolt.

But, instead I found the marriage of Joseph Wormuth and Miss "Helen" Debeck; in a brief marriage announcement in the The Republican Watchman, June 16, 1846, page 3, in the New York Historical Newspapers project.  They were married Apgil 9, 1846 n Callicoon.  Her name was actually Eleanor, not Helen, as published.

So before I continue with this little bit of family history, just a few words about names and media and censuses, etc.:

• So-called "official" documents and all the censuses are rife with unbelievable errors, bad handwriting, terrible photocopies, poor transcriptions; but, they're what we've got.  In both cases, the information is written by someone other than the person about which the document is concerned.  In some cases, the information is not given by the actual individual but by a family member or even a neighbor.  In addition, there are omissions because the person supplying the information didn't know or didn't want to answer.
• People don't listen; they listen to what's in their head, not to the words of the person they're facing.
• Errors are repeated because fact-checking requires an interest in facts and in accuracy and most people will just copy something that's already out there rather than doing the research; for example, most Ancestry family trees, that are mostly worthless.

If you see a person's name in print and it's different in one place than in another, obviously, if you care about accuracy, you look for the name in as many places as possible and in as many different kinds of documents as possible; then, you can figure out what the actual name is.

Eleanor appears in one census as Ellen, in all the others she appears as some spelling of Eleanor.  I have a transcript of her death record and her name is Eleanor.  So, this newspaper heard what they wanted to hear or somehow had her name as Helen.  They were incorrect.

Now, the surprise:

According to the clipping, Eleanor was married before.

So, I will do some research and find out more about her, supposed, former marriage.  Did she have children from the previous marriage?  Who was her former husband and what happened to him?

More later....

                                               

Updates and this and that

 I've been very busy, happily busy.  I've been working on both the Beismer Name Study and the Wormuth Name Study.  I started another one-name study, The Swartwout Name Study, because I met a bunch of Swartwouts in a group on Facebook.  I started a one-place study for Rockland, Sullivan County, New York.  I was going to do one for my hometown, Walton, New York, but I realized that a lot of my research has been in Rockland so....

The Beismer Study now has 108 profiles tagged @ WikiTree so I'm going to slow down and go back and look at each profile to be sure they tidy, have basic information and sources before I continue adding more profiles.

The Wormuth Study has 160 profiles added @ WikiTree and I'm doing the same with them; making sure the profiles are up to standards.  In the course of adding profiles to the project, I rediscovered a variant spelling I'd forgotten about, Warmoth.  That means there are probably more spellings out there as well.

Another thing I confirmed today is that the Wormuths that I'm related to are NOT related to the Wormuths in the Mohawk Valley, at least not related to the famous Peter Wormuth in Fort Plain.  The reason I know that is because he had only one son who was killed by Joseph Brant and he wasn't married and had no children.  Now, that Peter and his wife, Anne Failing, had a lot of children, all the rest female and they may be related through other relatives and marriages.  There were also other Wormuths in the Mohawk Valley so more sorting out to do.  That Peter Wormuth because famous because Washington stayed the night at his house, which is no longer standing.  There are a lot of Wormuths and some names the same so keeping people straight is sometimes difficult.  That's why the profiles are helpful; if they have the basic, birth, marriage, death and children, they make it easier to know who's who.

I almost forgot.  In adding Wormuth profiles @ WikiTree to the project, I send quick messages to managers of those profiles letting them know what the sticker on their profile means.  I got an interesting email from one of them who bought a 125 year old house in Seattle and is doing a history of everyone who was ever born, lived in or died in the house.  Among them was the Wormuth whose profile I had contacted her about.

Oh, and, it was necessary for me to adopt quite a few Wormuth (actually Warmouth) profiles that were orphaned.  That means that somebody created a profile for someone and never came back and, eventually, WikiTree purges, I guess, the managers and the profile can be adopted.

The Swartwout Study is new.  There are a lot of members of the Facebook group.  So far we've only added 40 profiles @ WikiTree but there are a lot of them there, it just takes time to add them to the project.

Mark Swartwout, who's in the Facebook group has a couple of web sites about the family that has a lot of history and interesting information:

Swartwout Chronicles

The Swartwout Family

The Rockland One-Place Study is the newest and I just got the pages @ WikiTree set up.  The area is very historic and I found out a lot about the towns already.  I'll be spending some time there this year finding out more.  The project will collect and disseminate information about the town, the village and all the hamlets and will have profiles of individuals who lived and died there.

My computer is on the verge of dying.  I'm getting a decent tax refund so I'm going to buy a new one and maybe a new multifunction printer.  In the meantime, my files are constantly being backed up and I'm going to have somebody look at this computer to see if they can give it a little more life.

There's a lot more to do.

I have got nowhere with the cemetery projects because nobody answers my emails.  Try, try again.

I have not contacted anyone about the genealogy project I want to do with local historical societies.  If anyone reading this is a member of a local historical or genealogical society, I'd like to talk to someone about my idea.  I don't currently have enough money to fund the project I have in mind but....

That's it for now.  Comments would be appreciated.