[or-roots] Great Website for DLCs

[Leslie Chapman]

Pat;

Thanks for the link, I was a little disappointed in the quality of the
scans, but then they are dealing with very faded material, often the
originals (fi they haven't microfished and destroyed them twenty years ago
or some such,) are hard to read. Thgat is faint and some of the people
making these original records had handwriting about like mine.

I tried to find my property survey and the first thing I noticed is that
there is no rhyme nor reason to the indexing numbers on that web site, I
think they are related to how this stuff was recorded in the original books
which system never made any sense to me and I make my living with this
stuff. I tried trial and error, and was too lazy to write down which numbers
I was trying so never knew for sure if I checked all of them, then I started
back up the page and every one I clicked on gave me the same image so be
advised this site needs some work, nowhere that I can see does it tell you
where in the township you are, and further in typical Surveyors office
fashion you will find information about each township next to it, or at
least that was what I found in my target township. If you open the line
called "introduction" on some of them it will give you a map page with the
relevant section lines marked as surveyed.

On some it won't.

I didn't find what I was looking for, but maybe someday when I am in a
better mood I will try again.

AS TO township names, I believe you will find that is a Midwest to east
coast convention. In point of fact you will find the distinction between
"township" and "county" gets a little blurred east of the rockies. I seem to
remember an awful lot of counties in Texas are about a township in size,
Texas doesn't have very many big counties, but sure has the most of them.
Alaska with twice the land area has "burroughs" (sp?) about five or then of
them as I recall, which means most of them are bigger than most states. We
have a few counties in Oregon that can make a similar claim, though only
bigger than a few states. As an aside Lane County is about the same size as
Holland.

I think the reason we don't have named townships is we don't need them so
much as a "populated place" identity; we have well defined cities, towns,
and villages which are largely seperated by empty land with a house every
few miles in most of the land west of the rockies, or at least that was the
way it was till well into the 20th century. The northeast and to a lesser
extent the midwest you had many uniformly spaced smaller holdings with
ocasional lumps of poputlation in villages towns and cities, but it seems to
me like people were a little more uniformly distributed and making  a
township into a political entity made more sense.

The above are not facts by the way, those are just my understanding of the
relationships. I could probably figure out whether I was blowing smoke or
not in an hour or so online, but I am going to go take a nap insted before
dinner and let someone else have the pleasure of telling me I'm and idiot.

Les C

-----Original Message-----
From: or-roots-admin at sosinet.sos.state.or.us
[mailto:or-roots-admin at sosinet.sos.state.or.us]On Behalf Of Kith-n-Kin
Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2006 5:38 PM
To: or-roots at sosinet.sos.state.or.us
Subject: [or-roots] Great Website for DLCs


Ran across this today and recalled our discussion a couple of weeks ago re:
Donation Land Claims.

This is a website where you can, by Twp and Range, look at original
surveyors notes.

http://www.aocweb.org/fieldnotes_100/

I didn't find any index where you could find names, but, if you know the
original DLC number, and/or name
of the patentee, you may find some very interesting stuff.

The only one I found in 6S1W was Samuel Allen. When I have time, I'll look
for more. I wonder if anyone
has ever done an index?

ALSO -- sorry to shout -- today I was told that every township (i.e. 06S1W
Willamette Meridian) had to
have a name. Sure enough, in South Dakota, they were named.  Outside of
precincts, which appear to cross
township boundaries, I have not seen labels for Oregon.

Does anyone know more about this?

Thanks

Pat (in Tucson)