Finding the Family Farm - How I located the ancestral homesteads.

FIRST - Don't worry about knowing the meaning of all these technical land description terms. They are just labels standing for something we want to know. Don't let the language get in the way of finding your ancestral homestead. I'll share my method here step-by-step.

This system has worked for me here in Oregon, I have not yet tried it with the homesteads my farmer ancestors claimed in Iowa, Indiana, and Kentucky, where I know my farmer ancestors took up homesteads. Here is what has worked for me with the Oregon Territory Donation Land Claim farms.

First find their name in the DLC book of claims, which is by county. Get the DLC number from the book, or, here in Oregon, from the Early Oregonian database our state government created from state and federal records on those early pioneers.

Then put their name, and the DNC #, with the county, into the BLM search engine. Sometimes it works with just the name, or just the name and DNC #. The result looks like this: (remember: click to enlarge)

Image from BLM, a Federal document, not under copyright. This is the description of James and Mary Ann's 320 acre farm. Their land description is 14 South, 4 West, in Section 17 of Linn County. When you get your own BLM document, check those little boxes on the top and left side of the attached map. It is interactive, and will show a graphic exactly where the property is located.

The land description reads: State/Meridian/Township-Range/Aliquots/Section/Survey/County. What I needed at this point was a good (free) map showing the land in Linn County where Sherrills settled with the meridian and section lines, to begin. I found a good one at "Linn County OR Plat Map" You can see that the whole map is large connected squares. Those squares represent one square mile of land. Notice the numbers and letters - those represent the distance from the Willamette Meridian in terms of east and west, (north and south are measured from a baseline - it works whether we know the details or not, for these purposes). Here is where it really helps to have a feature in the land that will make it easier to identify. Sherrill's homestead is located at Irish Bend on the Willamette River, which makes it easier to see it on various maps.

Now we come to the "aliquots". This is just a way of describing smaller sections of the land. Here is a picture of how it works, and a link to a simple explanation.

The state of Oregon ordered surveys of the state in 1876, and those maps are available at no cost, no copyright, at the Library of Congress. I have downloaded one section of one of the maps, that includes the Sherrill's homestead, and then put it in a paint program, and labeled the sections where their homestead is. You can see it at WikiTree on my 1852 Oregon Trail page. There are other maps showing the survey lines, some with road maps on them, others topographical. The interactive map won't work on the above image, it is just a picture. Try out the interactive map with this link to my 2xgr-grandfather James Sherrill's homestead Patent. Good luck with finding your ancestral homesteads!