LAND, HO! Or, Give Me that Old-Fashioned Research . . . sort of

I have had contact with a couple of people showing, through DNA, something along the line of 4th cousinship with me.  Nice!  They are both, oddly enough, related through an affiliated family of my mother's Nave lineage from East Tennessee, of the surname Taylor.  So to help all three of us, I am delving deep into Tennessee Land Records from the late 1700s and the early 1800s.  It is a good thing I am trained as a paleographer, that is, a reader of old handwriting.  

I went to Ancestry (okay, so this isn't totally old-fashioned genealogical research, but slogging through old land records and transcribing them is -- so there!) and typed in an ancestral name and came up with a very long list of records of East Tennessee land pertaining to John Nave, a brother of my 4th great-grandfather Abraham Nave.  I'm reasonably sure it is my particular ancestor, as the area was rather sparsely settled in the late 1700s, and Nave was not a common surname at all, the family having emigrated a generation earlier from Switzerland.  They settled in Pennsylvania, then Abraham and John's father, Teter Dietrich Nave, moved on to Tennessee.

So now I'm in the throes of transcribing a huge number of land records so I can go through them and gather what gems there may be in them, and then the same for the surname Taylor, to see who of that surname may have intersected with John Nave or his brother Abraham, or any of Abraham's descendants.  Then I will be off in search of any wills that may exist.  There I hope to find names of children, siblings, and spouses, to further investigate through whom my new cousins and I are related.

These land records are reminding me once again what a confounding sort of land recording metes and bounds is, to my thinking.  This is the sort of land record where you read something along the lines of "Beginning at a gum tree [which could live 150 to 300 years, but your ancestor's survey was done in 1677 . . .] south N poles [or rods; 16.5 feet, or one-fourth of a chain] to a stake [which could rot in a few years or be otherwise dislodged], then west N poles to a rock [which may erode or wash away in a flood] where John Doe's line begins [Well, where did John Doe's line begin?  There are more land records to slog through . . . ], then north along Whatsisname Creek [which may have dried up decades or a century ago] . . ."   In other words, a system that depended on quirky landmarks the existence of which into the 21st Century was chancy, at best.

My oldest line in the United States, that of my father's family, settled in Massachusetts in 1638.  Massachusetts uses the metes and bounds system.  I'm not sure where my mother's line came in, sometime probably in the 1700s, but both lines ended up in Indiana and Illinois, thence both headed to California.  Illinois, Indiana, and California are federal-land states (also known as public-land states), which use the much more rational, to my mind, system of township and range for measurement of land.  This system results in, as far as is possible, rectangular measurement that depends on a grid imposed on the land map, rather than on ephemeral landmarks on the land itself, or in it.  I live in Florida, which, unlike the rest of the states on the Eastern seaboard is also a federal-land state (Virginia uses both; that's got to be confusing).  Illinois, Indiana, and Florida are perfect for the federal-land system:  they're flat.  Imagine having to deal, in metes and bounds, not only with landmarks that are not there anymore and haven't been for quite a long time, but also with mountainous terrain, such as in Tennessee.  

One part of a land parcel description in one of these records, a parcel belonging to John Nave, mentions that it is "lying in the County of Carter in said district on the north side of Stony Creek on the south side of the mountain.  Beginning at a stake near a gum tree . . . "  My question is:  "Which mountain? There are many mountains to the north of Stony Creek.  One could go slogging to and fro along Stony Creek for a goodly distance looking for a gum tree that may or may not be there, and it's a fair bet the stake isn't there, either.  Of course, what happens is you end up following this parcel of land through the years, the decades, the centuries until it was last sold, and hope the land description was somehow updated.  

I have found two software packages designed to plot land parcels from metes-and-bounds descriptions.  There are other packages, but they are mainly for surveyors, real estate offices, and other land-related professionals, and are priced as such.  The two I'm discussing are aimed at a more general sort of customer, including homeowners and genealogists.  One package is reasonably priced, and even has a free version.  Information about its features and its price are all on one page.  However, if you want to keep it updated, there is an annual fee for that, though the website says that updating the software is not absolutely necessary.  They will both plot rectangular (federal-land) parcels, too.  The one thing I did not see on any of the second package's descriptions was the price.  They are not up-front with the price anywhere on the website, unlike the first package.  You can download this one for a 30-day trial, but may not find out how much it is until you've done that.  You might want to brace yourself for sticker shock, but I'm not sure if that is necessary, because, of course, I have no idea what the price is, since it isn't mentioned if you're just browsing to find out information about this software.  To find information about the features of this software, you have to go to another page of the site.  I am not mentioning the names; but if you Google "deed plotter," you'll find them.   

Caveat emptor.  And good luck if you have ancestors who lived in a metes-and-bounds state.