Discovering Genealogical Record and Historic Information with BLM

This week, I’m kind of on a “history” trend.  I’d like to show you another site that has cool stuff that you can use for research on your genealogy, history or travel sites.  It’s great for environmental and natural resource sites as well, particularly if you are writing about mining activities or other uses of public resources.  Best yet, it’s free.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has a federal records search service that allows you to access old homestead patents, survey maps, and mineral/land use reservations.

The patent searches often yield copies of the original land patents, signed by presidents.  Even if a copy of the original patent is not available, the site provides in-depth information about the original patent.

For instance, let’s say you are putting together a travel site about California and want to add some interesting pieces about ghost towns.  One of the ghost town areas in California is at the Salton Sea, which is littered with abandoned hotels, eateries and other buildings.

I don’t know who the original settlers of the Salton Sea area are, so I will need to look for patents by location.

You can get old homestead patents by searching for the township-section-range.  To find this information about the Salton Sea, go to the BLM and Forest Service’s “GeoCommunicator.”  Choose a map type (I choose Forests) and then search for your location.  As shown in the image below, you can search by place name, and then you’ll see the township-section-range information.

Using the data from the GeoCommunicator, I can now see if there are some homestead records.

Go to BLM’s Land Patent Search page.  The basic search lets you search by name of owner.  Since we don’t know the names of the owners, there is a standard search which allows for searches by location.  As you can see from the screen shot below, I used the Section 27, Township 10 South, Range 11 East description found on the GeoCommunicator map.

After typing in the location, I can see all of the homestead records and patents that were issued for this portion of land near the Salton Sea.  Except for the patent issued to the railroad, these are old patents, dating back to the late 1860s.

In this particular instance, the homestead patent was not scanned in; however, there is plenty of information to launch some interesting research for articles or genealogy stories.  Here’s an example of the wealth of information you can find in a patent.

From this information, we know that Lux and Miller had significant land holdings in the Salton Sea area.  This is a good launching point for a travel or historical article about the area.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Related ...

• June 28, 2009 -- A Wonderful Resource for Travel and History Sites (1)