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. They only completed these Warrantee Maps for about 1/3 of the land mass of Pennsylvania, and Tioga County is one of the completed counties. The Pennsylvania State Archives has been so kind as to post these images online (scroll below the 1875 atlas images for links to these Tioga County Township Warrantee Maps) but they are not indexed.

Tioga County was created from Lycoming County in 1804. Originally, the area that became Tioga County was annexed to Northumberland County in 1785. It became part of Lycoming when Lycoming ws created in 1795. These dates are important because warrants, wills, deeds, etc. were filed in the county as it existed at that time. 

Also, the entire northern 1/3 of Pennsylvania was disputed by Connecticut and by Native Americans.  Indians finally gave up their claims to Susquehanna County and a huge swath of Pennsylvania through the “New Purchase” of 1768. Those who purchased under the New Purchase had their land applications entered into the New Purchase Register.

Note that this area was part of the Last Purchase of 1784 (see the Last Purchase Register), and vast areas of land were first purchased from the commonwealth of Pennsylvania by land speculators before being resold to settlers. See the explanation of the Last Purchase on our Elk County page.  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.

The draftsmen at the Pennsylvania Land Office also 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 Pennsylvania State Archives has posted the online survey books (both front and back side of each survey have been digitized) 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.

19^th-Century Residents

In addition to links to the Warrantee Maps, we are posting free, downloadable images from 1875 County Atlas of Tioga, Pennsylvania From recent and actual surveys and records under the superintendence of G. H. Walker and C. F. Jewett (New York: F. W. Beers and Company, 1875. We hope this landowner map will be useful when coupled with the 1860, 1870 and 1880 censuses and published county histories such as the transcribed 1883 History of Tioga County, Pennsylvania with Illustrations, Portraits & Sketches of Prominent Families and Individuals published by W. W. Munsell & Co. (page images of this book are on the Internet Archive); 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; and the 1897 History of Tioga County, Pennsylvania by R. C. Brown & Co. (also available as a downloadable .pdf version on the Internet Archive).

Note that the links to the county histories will take you to Joyce Tice’s stunningly comprehensive website Tri-Counties Genealogy & History which contains, as she writes, “17,000 pages of resource materials and tools for Tioga and Bradford Counties in PA and Chemung County in NY.” Other publications in her “Tri-Counties Online Research Library” include military histories, township histories, historic newspapers, and a myriad of other resources. She has also posted an excellent chart showing the formation of townships with links to individual pages for each township containing extensive resources. DO NOT MISS HER WEBSITE if you are researching in Bradford County or Tioga County, PA (or Chemung County, NY).

 Other publications in her “Tri-Counties Online Research Library” include military histories, township histories, historic newspapers, and a myriad of other resources.

We posted these images, the best that we could make onsite, years ago.  In the interim, the University of Alabama has posted better images of the 1875 atlas but we are leaving our images online because they are easier to use.  If you can’t read an entry on our images, consult the Alabama images.