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Clearfield County Warrant Map by Ed Heary

The state of Pennsylvania began platting the exact metes-and-bounds tracts of the earliest landowners, township-by-township, starting in 1907, but the Land Office only completed about 1/3 of the state before the project ended and did not cover Clearfield County. We are incredibly fortunate, however, that Edward J. Heary painstakingly created connected draft maps of the original owners of land in three counties in central Pennsylvania, thus performing a priceless service for genealogists. The project, which included mapping Clearfield, Centre and Clinton Counties, took him many years to accomplish. These maps show the boundaries of the tracts on topographic maps, warrantees of the tracts, and the survey number of each, so that the original surveys can be obtained from the Pennsylvania Archives in Harrisburg. It is our pleasure to present to you below images of Mr. Heary's maps which may be copied onto your personal computer. There is no index yet to the Heary maps of Clearfield County, but taking time to search the images can yield a great deal of information about the earliest settlers.

Once you have found your ancestor's name, you will see a hyphenated entry such as A19-121. This refers to the the Survey Book (A19) and page number (121) where the survey was recorded in Harrisburg. The Pennsylvania Archives in Harrisburg, under the direction of Jonathan Stayer, has posted images of both the front and back side of every page of the Copied Survey Books online. Check both the front and back of the relevant survey. Nearly all surveys show the date of the warrant, the name of the county as it then existed, the date of the survey, and the neighbors owning the surrounding tracts at the time of the survey. Many times there is additional information. Armed with these pieces of information, you can either search the warrants which have also been posted online by the Pennsylvania Archives or consult our CD which contains all 67 County Warrant Registers and which can be saved onto your computer for easy access in repositories where no internet connection is available. The entry in the Warrant Register will also give the name of the patentee and the Patent Register and Page Number where the patent can be found (posted online by the Pennsylvania Archives), or you can purchase our CD containing all of the state Patent Registers for use when the internet is not available. You can write for copies of the original documents from:

Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission
Pennsylvania State Archives
350 North Street
Harrisburg, PA 17120-0090
Their order form is online.

Please note that these land transfers predate the deed books located in each county because they deal with the first transfer of land to private individuals at the state level. An excellent resource for Clearfield is Twentieth Century History of Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, and Representative Citizens by Roland D. Swoope, Jr., 1911, and it appears that the full text has been placed online at Clearfield County PAGenWeb Archives by Judy Banja and Sally & Claire White. What a wonderful contribution to genealogy! Also, a downloadable copy of the entire book is online. Also, the Clearfield County Genealogy Project hosted by Shirley Pierce and Nathan Zipfel has posted online another book, Clearfield County, Pennsylvania: Present and Past by Thomas Lincoln Wall, published in 1925.

Finally, here are the maps drafted by Ed Heary which we purchased from him. They are large images--each of them was originally about 3' X 4.5'--and may take some time to load (wait until the hourglass disappears for best image). We are publishing them with his permission, and those researchers with ancestors in Clearfield may want to drop him a note expressing appreciation for this momentous work!

Once they have loaded, you may enlarge them by clicking on them (wait until they become clear); also, you may save them to your computer by right-clicking on the image and choosing "Save image as...."


Clearfield Co. Township Warrantee Maps by Ed Heary
East Clearfield County
West Clearfield County

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