The Mad Genealogist

What land Warrants for the Military?

The granting of military bounty land in the United States to encourage enlistments or reward previous service began in colonial times, but its legislative heyday was from 1788 to 1855, though claims were still being received by the federal government in the 1960s. Genealogists find bounty-land records especially attractive because they serve the dual role of locating persons in time and place and of proving military service. Applications sometimes contain a wealth of information, especially when heirs claimed lands.

Colonial legislatures gave land for military service, such as for the Narragansett campaign of King Philip’s War, 1675 to 1676, but these were mostly private acts passed to reward meritorious service to the colony. In 1701, Virginia passed an act promising two hundred acres free of quitrents for twenty years to those who would make armed settlements on the Indian frontier. The Crown’s proclamation of 1763 ordered the colonies to give bounty land for service in the French and Indian War to “reduced” (indigent) officers and to British Army privates mustered out in the colonies who intended to remain there. This did not include militia units. In 1776, Congress promised so-called “Hessian deserters” fifty acres but had few takers. Also in 1776, Congress promised bounty land to soldiers of the Continental line, with privates and noncommissioned officers to get one hundred acres, captains three hundred acres, and other ranks various amounts. States that likewise promised or afterwards gave bounty lands were Connecticut, Massachusetts (with Maine), New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Revolutionary War Bounty Land Grants Awarded by State Governments (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1996), is a master index to approximately 35,000 persons named in the grants from these nine states. The states that did not give revolutionary war bounty lands were New Hampshire, Rhode island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Delaware.

North Carolina was the most generous, giving 640 acres (a square mile) to a private in the Continental line. Maryland gave the smallest amount, fifty acres to a private, but the state had very little western land to give.  Massachusetts grants were in Maine but were in no specific reserve. Privates who got a one hundred-acre warrant from the federal government were not eligible for a Massachusetts state grant. Soldiers of the Continental line from other states could take both the federal and their state land bounties. Paul Gates, History of Public Land Law Development, discusses aspects of various state grants. Gates states, without elaborating, that Connecticut gave bounty land; but this seems to refer to the Fire Lands in Ohio granted to individuals burned out in the revolution rather than to grants to soldiers. Virginia is discussed below because its bounty-land records are widely scattered; some are in the National Archives.

Congress was slow to redeem its promise of land for its soldiers. In 1788, it directed that bounty-land warrants be issued to those applying. But the U.S. Military District in Ohio, the only federal lands where federal revolutionary warrants could be used until 1830, did not open until 1796—a full fifteen years after victory at Yorktown. A planned second federal reserve at the southern end of Illinois was not created; instead, the district in Ohio was enlarged. The Ohio Company and John Cleves Symmes in 1787 and 1788 had purchased millions of Ohio acres on credit from Congress and were permitted to pay one-seventh of the price in federal bounty-land warrants. Therefore, land offices of the two speculations accepted some federal warrants, the earliest locales where they could be used. Congress also created three military reserves for veterans of the War of 1812, but there were no federal reserves after these three in Illinois, Arkansas, and Missouri. Warrants usable in the Virginia and U.S. military districts in Ohio were made redeemable by scrip acts in 1830 and 1832, respectively, in any GLO land offices in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. In 1842, all federal bounty-land warrants were made good for purchases at any GLO land office.

The 1788 act stipulated that warrants were assignable, meaning the soldier could sell his warrant and not wait to take the land. This created an instant market in bounty warrants and allowed land speculators to accumulate large quantities of warrants and land. Paul Gates shows that less than one soldier (or his heirs) in ten got land by using his warrant under any federal bounty-land act. Because few soldiers actually used their warrants to patent land, patents and land-entry case files are much less valuable than the warrants and the warrant applications for locating a soldier’s military service. Most soldiers sold their rights, using the back of the warrant to assign it to the buyer, who might in turn assign the warrant to another buyer. Sometimes the assignment left the buyer’s name blank, to be filled in by the last purchaser. The warrant certificates issued to Mexican War veterans were folios, with the insides and back unprinted so they could be used for assignments.

The warrant market was big business, especially when warrants were no longer restricted to military reserve lands. Major brokerage firms dealt extensively in warrants, buying in the eastern states and selling to western land brokers and settlers. Financial newspapers in the boom years of the 1850s frequently carried price quotations. The government set a price ceiling from 1820 by charging a flat $1.25 per acre for most of its lands. The average market price peaked at about $1.20 an acre in 1854–55 for 160-acre warrants, just before the market was flooded by the act of 1855.17 More warrants were used in Iowa than in any other state, and it is estimated that half of Iowa was purchased with bounty-land warrants.

The federal government gave no bounty land for service after 1855, but Union veterans of the Civil War received special homestead rights: in 1870, the right to claim 160 acres within railroad grant areas (other homesteaders got only 80), and in 1872, the right to deduct the length of their war service from the five-year residency needed to prove a homestead.

To get a federal bounty-land warrant it was necessary, under any act from 1788 to 1855, for the soldier or heirs to apply. The warrant applications are in Record Group 15 in the Military Service Records section of the National Archives. The surrendered warrants (those used to obtain land) are in land-entry case files of the patentees in Record Group 49 in the National Records Center, Suitland, Maryland. The case file categories are briefly described in Harry P. Yoshpe and Philip P. Brower, Preliminary Inventory of the Land-Entry Papers of the General Land Office, pp. 7–9, known as Inventory No. 22. The patents, obtained by using land warrants, were like any other GLO patents. The official copies are in the Eastern States Office of the BLM in Springfield, Virginia. In seeking the various records related to a federal bounty-land warrant, the researcher should try to learn the warrant number, the acreage claimed, and the act used—for example, warrant no. 8256, forty acres, act of 1852. This information could be unnecessary because the National Archives may handle the searching, but having it in full or in part allows for more precise requests, thereby increasing the chances of success. The best source is the bounty-land application files.

Deeds form the bulk and backbone of American land records. They are fairly uniform in format and content, can normally be located in routinely predictable jurisdictions—usually the county—and generally present few difficulties for the average researcher. Being one of the most important components of the workaday civil law (as opposed to criminal law), deeds contain a fair measure of legal terms. Genealogy Encyclopedia provides definitions of land of legal terms.

The term “deed” can be used broadly to mean a legal document of transfer, bargain, or contract, or narrowly for a warranty deed by which the seller warrants (guarantees) the title to the land being sold. Deed books contain many types of title conveyances and contracts: deeds in fee simple granting absolute ownership, mortgages transferring property rights as security for a debt, dower releases waiving a wife’s rights, quitclaim deeds releasing whatever title or right is held whether valid or not, deeds of gift transferring land without a reciprocal consideration except perhaps “love and affection,” powers of attorney appointing legal agents, marriage property settlements between spouses either before or after the marriage, bills of sale transferring property that is usually not land, and various forms of contracts, such as leases, partnerships, indenture papers, and other performance bonds. These last four were not ordinarily recorded, though probate bonds were common in probate volumes. Deed books from before the Civil War and especially in colonial years were more miscellaneous in their contents, even including animal brands, occasional wills, slave manumissions, apprentice papers, petitions, depositions, tax lists, and whatever else the clerk decided to preserve on a convenient page.

European settlers and their governments brought to the colonies the principle that before land could be privately owned the government had to pass title into private hands. Thus, for any tract of land there should be a first-title deed, which is normally called a grant or patent. Usually the authorities sought from the local Indian tribes a cession of Indian title, though this concept of owning land was foreign to the Indian view of communal occupancy. Once the Indian title was terminated to the satisfaction of the whites, the government could grant title for a tract to an individual, corporation, or, in the case of federal grants, even to a state. All subsequent transfers of a tract are by deed or analogous conveyance, or by inheritance.

In the United States, responsibility for guaranteeing legal title rests with the buyer and seller, who nowadays usually employ professional title searchers and lawyers to trace the chain of title back to the first-title grant if possible, attempting to verify a valid, unencumbered title transfer at each step. The government limits itself to the role of a referee—supplying the rules, recording the results, and adjudicating disputes brought to court. To simplify such title searches, title abstract and insurance companies have arisen to make professional searches and sell insurance against defective titles. Such companies have compiled indexes to title transfers in their local areas. If a genealogist can afford the high expense, such a title company could compile an ancestor’s local land records. Also, there are cases where the local deed office has been destroyed recently but abstracts survive in the private title company records.

An important fact follows from the American system of deed registrations: The records are usually sought by the names of the buyer or seller rather than the tract name or number. This means that a break in the chain of recorded owners can complicate a genealogist’s understanding of why, in the absence of a deed, John Smith now owns land that Mary Smith owned ten years ago. The land could have passed from mother to son by will with proof only in the probate records, or it could have passed by intestate probate and not be recorded at all. It could also be that the two persons are unrelated and that Mary sold the land to Paul Williams, who then sold it to John Smith, neither of the deeds being recorded, perhaps to save the cost of the clerk’s fees. Or perhaps the deed from Mary Smith to John Smith was by sheriff’s sale and indexed under the sheriff’s name as seller. Such a sheriff’s sale for delinquent taxes raises the point that tax foreclosures affecting the land would be in court records, while a bankruptcy suit might be processed in another county entirely.

A registry system called Torrens attempts to resolve some of these problems. Named for Robert Richard Torrens, the South Australian legislator who developed it in the late 1850s, Torrens ideally records in one place under the title of the tract all former owners and all rights, interests, and liens to which the property is subject. Having established the registry as mandatory and complete, the government can then issue guaranteed certificates of title to a new owner. While available in about twenty states, Torrens has not operated in the United States as intended for several reasons, including constitutional questions of right of appeal to the courts, the great expense of the registration, inadequate insurance funds to insure title guarantees, the statutory exclusion of certain encumbrances from the Torrens records, and—it is said—sabotage by private title companies and lawyers fearing loss of business.

For the genealogist, the advantage of a Torrens chain of title may be offset where the deed indexes are by tract rather than buyer and seller, a situation said to operate in parts of Iowa. Usually there are two sets of indexes, one by tract and one by buyer and seller. If there are no buyer and seller indexes, the genealogist would need to search each tract record to insure comprehensive coverage of an ancestor’s land transactions in the county. However, Torrens has never flourished in the United States, so the chances are small that the researcher will encounter this particular problem.

The variety of records in deed books requires the user to develop certain searching and abstracting skills. Because few researchers have the time to read, page by page, the forty, fifty, or one hundred volumes of deeds in an average county or independent city, the user usually turns to the index. Seller indexes are also called direct and grantor indexes; buyer indexes are indirect and grantee indexes. Some counties have alphabetical indexes only for sellers, which requires reading all index entries from A to Z to check the buyers (for example, the buyers would be listed next to the sellers, but only the sellers are alphabetized). Before relying on a deed index, it is wise to make an informal sampling of the contents of the deed volumes to see if they contain records significantly different from deeds and if these different sorts of records are indexed along with the deeds. There actually exist deed volumes containing wills omitted from the deed index and not found in the probate indexes either.

While cumulative deed indexes are usually in alphabetical order (“alpha” order), running indexes cannot be because more names are continually being added. Some running indexes merely group surnames under their first letter (initial order), so all A surnames are together (unalphabetized), all B surnames together, etc., with special pages for Mc and O’. Occasionally, a clerk ignored the patronymic prefix and indexed MacDonald, for example, with D surnames and O’Carroll under C. More elaborate running indexes were sold commercially by companies vying for sales by inventing unique, eye-catching systems. Such complicated indexing systems must be mastered when encountered, though usually there are instructions in the front of the volume. Some allocate separate pages for vowels (surnames Ba, Be, Bi . . .), some for consonants (the l-m-n-r-t system brings Chalkley, Cullison, and Czeskleba to the same page, because each has an l as the first internal “key” letter). Some running indexes use an initial surname order subdivided by initial letters of the given name (so Gregory Buck, Gary Ball, and Gertrude Brown are all on the same page).

Other problems with indexes are sins of omission—creating only a grantor index, mistakenly omitting a name, or ignoring non-deed items. This last problem is fairly common, especially in alphabetized master-deed indexes compiling all the deed volumes of the last one hundred or two hundred years. Whether the indexer will consider the barrel brand of Thomas Forehall, cooper, worth indexing is doubtful, especially because it was recorded 150 years ago and can serve no contemporary purpose. The researcher must always choose between trusting the index or checking the book or needed years page by page. Deeds with more than one buyer or seller may be indexed under the first’s name only, another reason to take the time to read page by page if the problem warrants it. There is also the occasional deed that provides information on a surname different from either the seller or buyer. On 7 May 1763, William and Betty Eskridge of Northumberland County, Virginia, sold land to Thomas Williams and, in passing, the deed gave a beautiful account of the Neale family, former owners of the land.

Having found an actual entry in the deed volume, either by using the index or by page-by-page scanning, you should have a fairly standard format for abstracting entries. It is wise to train yourself to first write down the source (or, if you have photocopied the entry, to immediately write the source on the photocopy). The source includes the archive or library where you found the record, as well as the record type, volume, and page. Below are three examples. Printed notekeeping forms help some people remember to copy such sources. Be sure also to include your name and the date when you found the record.

As for abstracting a deed, the style is up to the researcher. Find a format you like and try to standardize it within adaptable limits. Records tend to follow standard formats, which makes abstracting easier.

Some users forget that the deed book is a copy of an original paper and that, therefore, the deed book signatures are usually in the clerk’s handwriting—they are not holographs. Some jurisdictions, however, did require a signature on the copy they retained, so watch for them. Likewise, the seal—in wax and later in paper—beside the seller’s signature was real on the original; but, in the deed book, the clerk drew a stylized circle surrounding the word “seal.” The use of personal wax seals has long been out of fashion; but in the colonies, men were expected to have or borrow some sort of sealing device, which usually supplemented the illiterate’s mark. Even English peasants as early as the thirteenth century were required by law to seal their signatures; in fact, there was a time when the seal was the official attestation and the person’s mark was auxiliary. By the late seventeenth century, the seal was merely a traditional ornament. Consequently, heraldic devices on colonial seals probably do not prove a signer had a coat or arms. In fact, George Washington had a seal with a device different from the family coat of arms, a fairly typical situation.

Seals and signatures are, however, minor problems compared to late recording. Since running indexes show names in chronological order, a 1735 deed recorded in 1802 is so out of place that the researcher may not carry the search far enough to spot it. Actual examples include a deed dated 31 March 1800 and recorded 21 March 1896 in Montgomery County, Georgia, with another in the same place dated 30 December 1791 and recorded 110 years later on 30 July 1901. In the same general category are deeds re-recorded after a courthouse or town hall burned. Also be alert to indexes that show only the recording date, because behind the 1827 date could be an 1818 deed. If the ancestor died in 1823, the researcher might mistakenly conclude from the index that an 1827 deed could not be the ancestor’s.

Land records provide two types of important evidence for the genealogist. First, they often state kinship ties, especially when a group of heirs jointly sells some inherited land. Second, they place individuals in a specific time and place, allowing the researcher to sort people and families into neighborhoods and closely related groups. By locating people with reference to creeks and other natural features, the deeds, land grants, and land tax lists help distinguish one John Anderson, son of Mark, from another John Anderson in the same county. Prior to the Civil War, most free adult males owned land; so if the land records of an area have survived but do not mention your ancestor, you should reevaluate the assumption that he or she lived in the area.

Most beginning genealogists underestimate the importance of using land records to pin persons to specific locales. In the South, which has far fewer vital records than New England, the land records are even more crucial to genealogical success.

Many of the land records mentioned in this series have been microfilmed and some are transcribed online. The Genealogical Society of Utah includes state land grants and county and some city deeds among its routinely microfilmed records. The society formerly microfilmed deed books only up to 1850, later up to the Civil War, and still later—in some cases but not all—the subsequent volumes. Sometimes cumulative deed indexes exist but were not microfilmed. Thus, despite the society’s vast number of land records on microfilm, you should not regard its catalog as a complete inventory of what survives.

Other microfilmed records belong to libraries and archives that have made their manuscript collections of private land company papers and other records available. The millions of federal land patents have also been microfilmed and are available through the Bureau of Land Management

Next Article: Learning about Land Records: Deeds