Ancestor Tracks is committed to becoming a one-stop resource for researchers of early Pennsylvania landowners. In addition to publishing our own books, we are posting images of 19th century maps and atlases that we personally took in the Library of Congress. Our goal is to post landowner maps, or links to other websites with landowner maps, for every county in the state.

Original Land Owners:  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. Unfortunately, Pennsylvania did not plat the tracts of the earliest landowners of Carbon County.

However, we are exceedingly fortunate that the 1875 atlas (see below) included maps showing the names of the warrantees, or very first landowners of Carbon Co.

The only way to find the date, book and page of the original warrant, survey, and patent for your ancestor is to search through those county Warrant Registers on the Pennsylvania State Archives website where each page of each county’s ledger is a separate pdf file, or download and save to your computer the entire set of 67 county Warrant Registers plus 3 pre-1733 ledgers called First Landowners of PA: Colonial and State Warrant Registers in the PA Archives, Harrisburg, 1682-ca 1940 ($35).   Once you have found the information, you can access the free online surveys, and you can order copies of the original documents from the Pennsylvania State Archives in Harrisburg using their order form. See our explanation of how land was transferred from the government to individual owners from the earliest days of settlement.

If you cannot find an original landowner’s name in the Warrant Registers, the next place to look is in Pennsylvania’s index to Patent Registers ($35). Within an index covering the relevant years, the names are grouped alphabetically by the first letter of the patentee’s surname, then grouped by volume number of Patent Book, and finally arranged chronologically by date of patent. Thus, you have to look through the entire alphabetical section (which may be as little as one page to as many as 50) to be sure you don’t miss anyone.

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.  Once the land passed into the hands of a private owner, any subsequent transfer of the land was recorded as deeds in the county courthouse as it existed at that time.

19^th-Century Residents:  We are posting free, downloadable images of two 19th-century landowner maps: (1) Map of the Counties of Monroe and Carbon, Pennsylvania From surveys under the direction of H. F. Walling (New York, 1860) (another version of this map is posted by the Leventhal Map Collection of Boston Public Library); and (2) County Atlas of Carbon, Pennsylvania From actual surveys by and under the direction of F. W. Beers published by Beers in 1875. We hope the images will be useful for pinpointing the whereabouts of residents in the 1850-1880 census records and those mentioned in History of the Counties of Lehigh and Carbon, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania by Alfred Mathews (1884). Also be sure to check out the comprehensive site on Carbon County History and Genealogy maintained by Jack Sterling–do not miss this site!