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.
- 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment
If you would like a response, please leave your email address.