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, and they completed a little more than half of Schuylkill County many years ago. In addition to the maps drafted by the state, Tim Conrad has used DeedMapper to place tracts in Upper Mahantongo and Eldred Townships in Schuylkill County and Upper Mahanoy Township in Northumberland County and maintains a truly outstanding webside). We are now working on the state-drafted township maps of Schuylkill County which will be the next volume in our Early Landowners of Pennsylvania series, but you can access the same maps we are transcribing (scroll down below the atlas to access these warrantee maps of the townships).  

The draftsmen at the Pennsylvania Land Office used 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 Warrant Registers give the Survey Book and page number onto which the loose survey was copied. The Pennsylvania State Archives has posted the online survey books  where you can access the surveys once you know the Survey Book and page number (both front and back side of each survey have been digitized).  Using the information from the Warrant Registers, 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.

To learn about the Pennsylvania Land Acquisition process that England set up to distribute colonial land (which basically continues today), as well as the boundary disputes (between Pennsylvania and Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and Pennsylvania and Connecticut), Revolutionary War Donation and Depreciation land, and land opened through treaties with Indians, see our Land Acquisition page.

Schuylkill County was originally nominally part of Lancaster and Bucks Counties but fell mostly in Berks County when Berks was created in 1752 with the northeastern portion in Northampton County. In 1772, a small portion of what would become northern Schuylkill fell into Northumberland and Luzerne Counties. Schuylkill finally became a county of its own in 1811.  Thus, all of these counties should be checked for warrants, deeds, wills, etc. depending on when your ancestor settled here.

19^th-Century Residents

As we have done for numerous Pennsylvania counties (hover over each county on the PA map), we are posting free, downloadable township images of  from the County Atlas of Schuylkill, Pennsylvania, From Recent and Actual Surveys and Records by F. W. Beers and A. B. Cochran (New York, 1875). We hope that you will find this atlas a useful tool for when coupled with the 1860, 1870 and 1880 census and published county histories: (1) Daniel Rupp’s 1845 History of Northampton, Lehigh, Monroe, Carbon, and Schuylkill Counties; (2) the short 1911 History of the County of Schuylkill In Honor of the County’s Centenary; and (3) the 1907 History of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, Including a Genealogical and Biographical Record of Many Families and Persons (Volume 1  and Volume 2)  edited by Schalck and Henning.