www.BobShermansPage.com

Using the US Bureau of Land Management's Free
General Land Office Records On-Line Search Resource
Added: Wednesday April 20, 2011

Have You ever Wondered about the Original Land Homesteaders and Land Surveys
Done of the United States ?

You Can find lists of Homesteaders, Dates, Size of Land Grants, Early land Survey
maps, scanned copies of the Original Homestead Certificates, & more !

I Started with wanting to learn more about a Family I knew in the 1950's,
as I was growing up in the South West Palm Beach, Florida area.

Right behind our house on the other side of a old fence, lived Phillip and Maria
Parker on about 5 acres of land. His Father, James Norris Parker, was a early
homesteader in April 10, 1894 with 135.06 acres of land.

I got to be good friends with Phillip and his wife Maria, He told many
great stories about early Florida and had many pictures to show me.

They have both since passed from this world, Phillip at 95 and Maria
just one month short of 100.

The remaining 4.5 acres of the homestead were sold years ago to the
Hillcrest Cemetery that is on the south side of the homestead.

So I began looking for Land Records for the Parker Homestead.

I will show you in the following Screens how to go about using the US
General Land Office Records On-Line Search Resource to find information
as I did for Mr. Parker's family..

First Lets Search for a List of Known Palm Beach County Homesteaders

Click on the Picture Below to go to the BLM Website

Warning ..... Once you Start it Can get Addictive .....

Select the State from the Pull down list and the County from its listing
No other entries are required, Then click the Search Patents button.

Now that We have Gotten some results back, Over a 100, You can click on
Column Headers to sort the results many different ways.. Here I sorted
by descending date, to see who were the first to start homesteading in
in Palm Beach County, Florida.

You can now go through this list and Click on the Accession number link ... Or

You could also enter info in the Name data, if you know it, as I did above

The Resulting screen will be displayed .. Click on the Accession number link

Now we have a Details screen about this Persons Homestead
Click on the Patent Tab to access a scanned copy of the Homestead Certificate.
You can view it and also download a Adobe pdf file to you computer.

Now you can find out about other Homesteads in the same land Section
by clicking on Related Documents Tab.

Now we can see that there were 3 other men that had adjoining plots to
Mr. Parkers land in the T43S R43E Section 4 in Palm Beach County, Florida.

We can access available Land Survey information by selecting the Surveys
Link on the left hand side of the listing.

From the list of Survey items, lets pick the Original Survey done in 1839,
That's before Florida's Statehood in 1845, It was finally approved in 1859.

Click on the Plat Image icon to open the file.

Now we have a copy of the original land survey used for Homesteading of these
Palm Beach County, Florida lands. By clicking on the PDF icon in the lower right
corner of the display screen, a pdf file will be created, which you can download.

But How Can I see Today's Actual Location of these Land Sections ?

Things have changed just a Little bit in 150 years .... You Think ?

Well... Google Earth has the answer !

Its Called Earth Point, one of the tools with Google Earth

Click on the Picture Below to go to the Earth Point Website

Fill the State, Principal Meridian, Township number, Range, & Section

Then, Click on the Fly To On Google Earth button

Google Earth will Open ... But You must have it already installed and
working on your Computer !

When the File Download Window opens, Click on the Open button.

Well now we have a Google Earth Aerial view of FL T44S R43E Section 4
The Township is outlined in Orange and Section 4 is in Pink

So with the Old Survey Map, the Google Earth Point data, and the BLM
Parker Plot data, I was able to determine his homesteaded area and his
Section 4 neighbors.

Enjoy and Happy Hunting for those Early US Homesteaders

View the next pages on my Main web page to see where this took me.

I told you this could get Addictive .....