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. See our explanation of how land was transferred from the government to individual owners from the earliest days of settlement. 

Unfortunately, Pennsylvania did not plat the tracts of the earliest landowners of Clarion County, a county of great interest to one of the proprietors of Ancestor Tracks.

If your ancestor was actually a first landowner, purchasing his or her property from the colony or state of Pennsylvania, further information about these tracts may be gleaned from the Warrant and Patent Registers of Clarion Co. (created in 1800 from parts of Lycoming, Mifflin, Northumberland, and Huntingdon Counties).  Before that much of today’s Centre County was in Bedford and Cumberland Counties. 

The only way to find the date, book and page of the original warrant, survey, and patent for your ancestor is to do what the state draftsmen did to create their warrantee maps of other counties.  They searched through the relevant county Warrant Register, and that of its parent counties, now posted 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. 

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:  In lieu of being able to bring you Warrantee Maps of the earliest settlers of Clarion Co., we are posting Caldwell’s Illustrated Historical Combination Atlas of Clarion County, 1877. This map is located in the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, D.C. We hope that it will be a useful tool for locating your Clarion County families when coupled with Civil War records, the 1870 and 1880 census records, and the downloadable History of Clarion County, Pennsylvania with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers edited by A. J. Davis, 1887, and McKnight’s 1905 A Pioneer Outline History of Northwestern Pennsylvania, Embracing the Counties of Tioga, Potter, McKean, Warren, Crawford, Venango, Forest, Clarion, Elk, Jefferson, Cameron, Butler, Lawrence, and Mercer.

We are posting only the historical sketch section of the atlas and the land ownership maps. Most of the entire atlas is online, including colored drawings of farms and buildings, homes of prominent citizens, as well as a business directory which includes the occupations, birthplace, and size of land tract.