Land Records

Nowadays, most of us would head for the court house to find land records. That is an important place to check, but there are other records.

Outside the original 13 colonies the untitled and unsettled land belonged to the Federal Government. The government had several ways of dispersing the land from simple sales to giving it away for a purpose. Politics aside there are places online to look for these land records.

The most popular is the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), General Land Office (GLO) Records website at http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/PatentSearch/ Read the direction because there are a lot of variables.

In Florida there is another website, the Florida Land Document Search, or try http://199.73.242.56 Some of the documents that aere found are the same, but there are additional documents and presentations of the documents. It functions like the BLM website, only just for Florida.

The legal description are normally by parts of a section of a Township and Range [future topic.] These databases allow the user to find other land owners in the section or adjoining property.