This is the one for anybody who has ever read “beginning at a white oak, thence north forty-five degrees east one hundred poles” and wondered where on earth that actually was.
You can draw a tract by clicking its corners on the map, which is enough when you already know roughly where the land sat. But the real work is done by copying from the deed itself. Enter the whole description — corner trees, thences, abbreviations and all — and the tool reads out the bearings and distances, shows you exactly what it understood so any misreading is visible, then walks the boundary corner by corner from a starting point you choose on the map. Poles, perches, rods, chains, links, and feet are all handled, along with the fractions and the degree-minute-second bearings the old surveys are full of.
Two things then tell you whether you have it right. The first is closure: walk every call in turn and you ought to finish where you began, and the tool reports how far short you land. The second is acreage — it measures what you drew and compares it against what the deed claims. A tract that closes to within a few feet and comes out at ninety-eight acres against a stated hundred is almost certainly in the right place. One that comes out sixteen times too large means somebody read chains where the deed said poles.
Old surveys were run with a compass, so they are all rotated a few degrees from true north. A slider corrects for that, turning the tract on the map while leaving the deed’s own bearings untouched — you are adjusting the drawing, never the document. Nudge it until the lines settle onto the creek and the ridge, and you have found the corner.
Put several tracts on one map and the picture gets better still. Each takes its own color; neighboring grants that share a line show whether they truly adjoin, and a family that bought up the land around it becomes obvious in a way no abstract ever makes clear. You can lay the whole thing over satellite imagery at whatever transparency you like, mark standalone places — a house site, a mill, a ford, a graveyard — and label each tract with its name, who the land came from, the source, the acreage and the date.
When you are done, download a shareable page holding the finished map, or a Google Earth file if you want to drop your tracts over modern parcel maps and aerial photography. The shareable page opens again in the tool whenever you want to keep working, deed descriptions and all.
Click the button to try out the Tract Plotter tool and other mapping tools that I’ve created and added to my website.
Questions, thoughts, other mapping ideas? Leave a comment!
