Earliest Owners of Land in Philadelphia Area

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: Pennsylvania Land Office draftsmen began working on a project in 1907  to plat all of the earliest land tracts and their owners who received land from the colonial or state government onto current township maps. See our explanation of how land was transferred from the government to individual owners from the earliest days of settlement. 

Unfortunately, the Land Office never got around to mapping Philadelphia, Bucks, or Montgomery Counties before the project ended in the 1950s. The reason may be that so many of the earliest surveys for the First Purchasers involved errors (two warrantees claiming the same piece of land, multiple overlapping claims, unpatented or untitled tracts, etc.), making it very difficult to place the original surveys onto modern township maps. Thus we are unable to write an atlas based on their maps as we have done with several counties.

The only way to find the date, book and page of the original warrant, survey, and patent for your ancestor is to search for him or her in the correct alphabetical section and then chronologically through 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. 

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 from Pennsylvania’s colonial or state government. Once the land passed into the hands of a private owner, any subsequent transfer of the land was recorded as a deed in the county courthouse as it existed at that time.