Land Speculation

5 March 2005
This article was originally published in Ancestry Magazine. When they post it online, I'll post a link here.
-Beau, 9 Jan 2006

When you think about it, we know two things about our ancestors. We may not know their names, or their parents’ names, but we can be sure that they had children, and that they lived some place. In 1859, James Sharbrough bought some land in Jasper County, Mississippi. I know, because my government told me so.

The original colonies turned their western lands over to the federal government, which in turn surveyed it (an adventure in itself), and then sold it. The initial sale of a parcel of public land was recorded by a patent at the land office, and the record was kept by the feds. Subsequent sales were recorded by land deeds, and the records were kept by the states and their dutiful administrative helpers, the counties.

So Jim bought land in Mississippi. He was just about to hit 35 years of age, and between the middle of 1859 and the 1860 census the following summer, he bought 400 acres of land in Jasper and Smith counties, in five transactions. When the enumerator came by, Jimmy told him that he was a farmer and had $8,000 worth of real estate, and about $2,500 worth of personal property outside of that. Today, that would describe an estate consisting of a 1995 Toyota and a 50” Sony television.

One of the things that I enjoy most is visiting ancestral homesites. Of course I don’t always know where the house was, but I like to stand on the land and imagine what it was like. I like to look north and imagine a blue one blowing in, or just ask myself how it looked in spring.

Visiting these places gets expensive. If it’s not too far, I drive. Sometimes I have to fly and then rent a car. I found Lilburn Scott’s farm near Sapulpa, and lo and behold there was a small graveyard under a shady tree, and the earthly remains of Lilburn and two of his sons, one of them my great-grandfather Lincoln, were there. I think he was just as surprised to see me as I was to see him, but that’s why you go on these trips.

I haven’t been to James’s land in Mississippi. Well, I haven’t been there physically. I’ve seen what it looks like today. I saw it on the internet. Finding your family’s land in cyberspace can be just as much of an adventure as going there in the real world.

First, I had to figure out where the land is. The patents contain a legal description, consisting of a township, range, and section, and often identifying a portion of a section, by the cool name of “aliquot parts.” Those refer to the shorthand for identifying a part of a section as small as 40 acres. If the record says “SWSE 2N 10E 32” I have learned that it means the southwest quarter of the southeast quarter of section 32 of township 2N and range 10E. That’s almost enough to know where it is, but I can tell you that knowing the county helps. Mississippi has county maps that show townships, ranges, and sections on them, online.

Once I can find it on a map, I can find it from a spy satellite. Truth be told, I don’t have a spy satellite, or know anyone who does. But I can use the Delorme Topo USA software, and buy the aerial and satellite photos for any part I want to see. It’s not the approach I’d recommend for most people – you’d need to have the software and that costs something. Then you’d pay for the photo data. Those boys at Delorme get me coming and going, but I don’t mind because I get curious a lot. Most people would be better off using Keyhole.

Keyhole is a program owned by Google. You download and install it just like any PC application (sorry, Mac lovers, Google says, “We currently do not offer a Macintosh version.”). You might be wondering about the price. There is a 7 day free trial that doesn’t require a credit card, but does require registration. After that, the personal version requires a subscription for $30 a year. Put the thought of money out of your mind, and install the program. Then forget about distance, money, time, and gravity. Start Keyhole and fly anywhere you want to go. It’s hard not to make bird analogies. Using Keyhole is flying. I kind of remembered the old Flight Simulator version 1. This is lots better. I can’t see my house, but I can see my street. And I can see James Sharbrough’s land in Mississippi.

Describing how to use Keyhole or Topo USA in any detail is beyond the scope of this article. That said, I’d like to show a couple of examples so you can get a better idea of what they tell you. I don’t prefer either program over the other – they have different features that I like.

I like Topo USA because I can draw on it pretty easily.

Figure 1. Topo USA screen capture

In this example, I’ve identified the 5 parcels of land that James Sharbrough bought on 10 Nov 1859. The screen is split into two views – 3D on the left and map on the right. Using the 3D controls, you can spin and turn a map in ways that help you get the lay of the land.

I like Keyhole because of the way that you can fly around, which I won’t demonstrate in this article.

Figure 2. Keyhole screen capture.

In this example, you can see the edge of the forest in places that look suspiciously like the boundaries of 40-acre parcels. You can also see the wind rows, that thin line of trees that divides the fields. The faint white vertical line in the center of the map is the boundary between Jasper and Smith counties.

It’s been almost 150 years since my grandfather’s grandfather bought the land in these images. But without leaving my house, I was able to find that he bought land, find where it was, and see what the land looks like.

We spend a lot of time looking for information. I think of it as wasted time, just like the time I spend cooking. I would like to know everything that the whole world knows already. I don’t want to look for a phone number, or a map, or a receipt that I swear I saw here someplace last week. But it’s better than it used to be. I can remember a prior life without the internet, when I would have to wait for weeks for a face to face meeting, to ask the person who knew the thing I wondered about. That’s assuming that I remembered to ask. The process of collecting information is changing around us daily, and it’s getting easier.

It’s not as if we can know anything we like, in an instant. Actually, the truth is quite the opposite – but we are starting to expect it. Knowledge is one of those through-the-looking-glass things – the more you have, the more you realize how little you have. For instance, now that I can easily find records about my ancestors’ land purchases, and find them, and map them, and then fly over them … now I want to know who lived next door.

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