The US Department of the Interior (DoI) Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has a very rich website with several search engines to assist in genealogy research for your ancestors who had land.
From the website: “Welcome to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), General Land Office (GLO) Records Automation web site. We provide live access to Federal land conveyance records for the Public Land States, including image access to more than five million Federal land title records issued between 1788 and the present. We also have images of survey plats and field notes, land status records, and control document index records. Due to the organization of documents in the GLO collection, this site does not currently contain every Federal title record issued for the Public Land States.”
The different search capabilities are:
- Land Patents
- Survey Plats and Field Notes
- Land Status Records
- Control Document
- Index Records
- Tract Books
- Land Catalog
There also is a robust Reference Center that contains detailed descriptions of each type of document, search tips, and an outstanding set of Appendices that will help explain a lot of the terms used, as well as many other details that help a researcher understand the idiosyncrasies of federal and public land. For the uninitiated, this website is a marvelous collection of information. To access the site, go to GLORecords.BLM.gov
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