14/09/2024
Great information for searching land records.
Tracing land ownership through time is one of the most important methods for proving generational relationships, particularly in the South. Often, though, we run into a problem where no deed or estate record exists to provide evidence of the sale of land, and we lose track of it. To determine what happened to the land, we then have to start with the current owner and research back in time. That's a very time-consuming process.
Now we have an amazing tool from FamilySearch making it possible to search for words buried within documents--including legal descriptions--that opens the door to answering some of these mysteries.
1. Go to FamilySearch Labs and choose the Full Text experiment (https://www.familysearch.org/en/labs/).
2. In the Keywords box, put the text from the known legal description.
3. You can put the words in quotes to search a phrase. You can also use the + sign before words to force entries that contain all the words of interest but not in a phrase.
I've already used this in numerous cases to find deeds for properties with a chain of title that was obscured in the regular deed indexes, just by searching for property descriptions. It takes some practice and it's still an experiment with a lot of imperfections, but it's already an amazing research tool especially where land is involved.