Land research help and more Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center

Did your research target buy or homestead federal land between 1820 and 1908? Did (s)he try to? Then you need to check out friend and colleague Kimberly Powell's correlation of at least three different on-line resources over at About.com. Tract books may be your new BFF.



A friend has pointed out an important omission from my Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center research book, Finding Ancestors in Fort Wayne. When planning a research trip, you can produce a private list of materials to consult, and include ratings and comments or reviews. When you locate a title in the main catalog, click on "Save or Tag," set up your account (it's quick and does not require holding a card at the library), and proceed to listmaking. (NOTE: This feature applies materials listed in the main catalog. There are several others to be consulted as well, including microtext, which does not have this capacity.) I will include this feature when the booklet is revised, but in the meantime there's this big conference coming up in three weeks...





Kimberly Powell, "Searching BLM Tract Books on FamilySearch," About.com Genealogy, 30 July 2013 (http://genealogy.about.com/b/2013/07/30/searching-blm-tract-books-on-familysearch.htm : viewed 30 July 2013).


Harold Henderson, "Land research help and more Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 2 August 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

You wish your ancestors stopped in Kane County, Illinois

This northern Illinois county, now a cluster of Chicago suburbs, is the only county I know where the county recorder has put its tract books on line. Tract books, in case you slept through that part of genealogy class, are property records organized by a particular tract of land. Not all counties have 'em, at least not back to the beginning.

Kane County's tract books consist of typed abstracts of property transactions -- to research the actual deeds you have to go there. And they're not indexed by name, so you need either to be really lucky (not me) or know exactly where your ancestor was (more specifically than just the township!). So it may or may not substitute for (or prepare for) a trip to the courthouse.

That's the beauty of property records -- they weren't created with us genealogists in mind. That's also the horror of them -- they weren't created with us in mind. Now, what I'd really like is to see the grantor-grantee indexes digitized!