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 

On this page, you will find the latest revision (2020) of our atlas (first published in 2007) for sale, showing the metes-and-bounds tracts of the very first owners of land in Berks County.  It contains all of the Township Warrantee Maps drafted by the Pennsylvania Land Office in the early 1900s. 

The draftsmen at the Pennsylvania Land Office painstakingly platted each original tract into current township boundaries using the Warrant and Patent Registers to create the Warrantee Maps. They searched each county and parent county, then each alphabetical section chronologically, in the 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) which can now be downloaded and saved to your computer. (Free images  are also posted on the Pennsylvania State Archives website where each page of each county’s ledger is a separate pdf file).  The Pennsylvania State Archives has posted the free online surveys (check both front and back sides) and you can order copies of the original documents from the Pennsylvania State Archives in Harrisburg using their order form.   The draftsmen also searched 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, the entire alphabetical section must be searched (which may be as little as one page to as many as 50) so as not to miss anyone. 

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

 The maps show precise outlines in metes and bounds of each original tract and all surrounding tracts in the township, giving the names of the warrantee and patentee; dates of the warrant, survey, and patent; and the patent and survey books and page of the recorded patent. Please be aware, however, that the state only platted 23 townships, or just over half of the county, before the project came to a halt. Therefore, similar maps from several other sources, although with less information regarding the tracts, have been added to this volume. 

We have added our own research to the resources on Oley, Centre, Maxatawny, and Rockland Townships to make them complete, but some work remains to be done on the remaining maps. The result is that original plats of the earliest landowners of over 75% of the county can be found in this book.

Each chapter begins with the Township Warrantee Map produced by the state draftsmen. A second map follows, cropped to eliminate marginal information, with atlas coordinates superimposed upon it. The third map for each township, which was formerly available only on a companion CD at separate cost, consists of modern road maps superimposed on the warrantee map by the Berks County GIS Department.

Following these maps are charts (see sample below) which include each fact included on every tract in the Township Warrantee Maps: names of the warrantee and patentee; size of the tract; name of the tract, if given; dates of the warrant, survey, and patent; Survey Book and page number where the survey was recorded; Patent Register and page number where the patent was recorded; and, finally, the coordinates where the tract in question is located. Numerous footnotes give further information, including neighbors shown on surveys at the time the survey was conducted.  Some of these neighbors do not appear anywhere else in land records.

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.

Before your buy our Atlas of Berks County tracts, see if the name(s) you are looking for appear in the 609-page Atlas Index. To see if they appear in individual township chapters (downloadable as pdf files), Index to Individual Township Chapters by SURNAME,” or to see the index by neighborhood, click on “Berks County Index by TOWNSHIP.”  

The majority of the warrants were issued before the first U.S. census in 1790, but some of the land transactions occur as late as the 1920s. 

No maps are included for the following townships: Colebrookdale, Douglass, Earl, Hereford, Ontelaunee, Perry, Pike, and Washington, We have added as much information as we could find for these townships from the East Side Applications Register (1765-1769) for these areas to document the first landowners, but these tracts are generally not located on the maps in this volume.  Partial maps and maps with little detail (sometimes only a name and year) are given for the following townships in the atlas: Albany, District, Greenwich, Longswamp, Maidencreek, Windsor, and Richmond.  Some of these names are not in the index.

Samples from the Berks County Atlas:  Below is a a part of an image of the Bethel Township Warrantee Map showing the type of information shown on each plat (see Philip Kremer’s tract at the top) and a the sample atlas page for this township showing the entry for Philip Kremer. The Township Warrantee Map superimposed by the Berks County GIS division onto modern road maps (included in this atlas) is on the right below.