A couple of weeks ago, I returned to hunting down the land owned by my ancestor, John Johnson. I know that John lived in Mason County, Illinois. There is a family story that John used Abraham Lincoln to help with the government land grant....but that's for another post. What I wanted to know was where the land was and who was living on the land in the 1874 Mason County Illinois Plat map of which I had a copy.
I started with the Bureau of Land Management's website http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/ and clicked to search for a Federal Land Patent. Into the BLM's search template, I entered State and County along with first and last name of my ancestor. With a name as common as John Johnson, I wasn't sure what I was going to get. But fortunately, the site returned with only 3 land patents entries. Only 1 of those patents was for the correct time frame of my ancestor moving to Mason County, Illinois.
From the BLM, I was able to get the land description. It appears that the BLM plans to or did have a mapping feature. But as luck would have it, it was not working. So how was I to translate the land description of meridian - township - range - section into something Google Earth would understand? Time to do a Google Search of that same question.
There it was... the land that my 3rd great grandfather was issued on July 1 1848. Now comparing to the Plat Map, it is in 1874 in the name of F L Mugge. The name doesn't ring any bells....guess I need to find an earlier Plat Map or time for a road trip to search the land records at the county courthouse!
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