Any genealogist who examines deeds in most of the United States must come to term with legal land descriptions. These are the sometimes confusing string of numbers and letters that show up as NW1/4 SW 1/4 Section 23 Twp. 4N Range 5E in deeds and entry books. Use these correctly, and you can pinpoint an ancestor’s land. Use them incorrectly, and you may think your ancestor was living in the next county. Many people are simply baffled. But it’s worth making the effort to understand them. A great glossary is provided on the Web site of the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office. ) This article covers much of the same ground but will apply the discussion to Jefferson and Switzerland Counties.Copyright by Robert W. Scott, 2001.The Northwest Territory Ordinance of 1787 created the system underlying these descriptions and if you’ve done work in the 13 original states, Tennessee, Kentucky, Vermont, and Maine, you’ll know why this system was needed. The older states use metes and bounds to define property boundaries. That means boundaries are described as starting at a stone, or an oak tree, or a John Smith’s corner and running so many feet, poles, or rods to the next boundary marker. The drawbacks to metes and bounds are obvious–imagine trying to find an oak tree 80 years later or figuring out where John Smith’s boundary was long after he died. If you’ve read about pioneers who lost their lands in Kentucky because of bad surveys, as did Daniel Boone, then you’ll understand what a blessing it was when Congress ordered the surveys to establish the legal descriptions in the Northwestern Territory and then extended it to the most of the country).
This system determined the location of land based on surveys with the descriptions deriving from the relationships each particular property had to a series of north-south lines, called Meridians, and an east-west base line. Of course, these lines were determined artificially. But once they were set, all property could be described in relationship to them, just as values in a formula in high school algebra can be described on an x-y access. Every tract of land can be uniquely identified by the intersection of the ranges, townships, and sections.
Ranges are designated as east or west (the horizontal x axis). In Jefferson County, the ranges start with 12E on the eastern Milton Township and work their way westward until you reach 8E in Graham Township. Townships are designated as north or south (the vertical y axis). Jefferson County townships run from 2N in the south and go through 5N. Jefferson County’s border with Jennings and Ripley Counties coincides with the border between township 5N and 6N. So automatically, if a tract has the 6N designation, you know it is not in Jefferson County. Anything in 1N is in Clark County. Switzerland County is much more complicated and I will address that separately.
To think of it in another way, this is exactly the same as using the town street map to identify a house at being at the corner of Third Street and Fifth Avenue (the intersection of the ranges with the townships). Think of the section number as the house number, which pins down the location. (In modern usage, township generally becomes Town, so descriptions speak of Range 10E and Town 4N, but the original is township.) A range is six sections wide from east to west. A township spans six sections deep from north to south. (And okay, with 36 sections the analogy to streets breaks down. Just think of there being 36 houses at each intersection)
Land is divided into Congressional townships and townships are further divided into sections. These Congressional townships have no legal standing. They should not be confused with the townships, which are administrative entities (but not incorporated in Indiana) into which Indiana counties are carved (Madison, Milton, Hanover, etc., in Jefferson County.) Each Congressional township has 36 sections. Each section contains 640 acres, exactly one square mile. From an airplane, you can easily see the impact of this system in flat areas of the Midwest, because many fields and roads are laid out in the squares. It’s harder in places like eastern Jefferson County or western Switzerland, where hills and streams provide natural borders. One side benefit of this system is that on maps, which show township and ranges, you can easily determine distance since each section is a mile square. Each range, therefore, extends six miles east and west and each township six miles north and south.
Sections are numbered in the following way. Section 1 is always in the northeast corner. The first row of sections is numbered left to right and the next row of sections is number right to left. The numbering continues to alternate until section 36 is reached on the SE corner. There are Congressional Townships that have numbers higher than 36, but that does not occur in Southeastern Indiana. Below is the numbering grid.
6 5 4 3 2 1 7 8 9 10 11 12 18 17 16 15 14 13 19 20 21 22 23 24 30 29 28 27 26 25 31 32 33 34 35 36 Every tract can be uniquely defined through this system. Section 25 Twp. 4N Range 12E is in Milton Township. Section 25 Twp. 5N Range 12E is in Shelby Township. Section 25 Twp. 3N Range 12E doesn't exist because it would be in Kentucky.
Researchers must also be careful to mark down the 1/2s and 1/4s and SW, SE, NW, NE, N, S, E, or W designations. A half section contains 320 acres. It can be drawn vertical or horizontally so you can have a N, S, E, or W half. A half always has a rectangular shape. A quarter section contains 160 acres. A quarter section is always square. Sometimes deeds don’t specify the acreage of a tract, they simply refer to it as a quarter or half and you must assume that it’s 160 or 320 acres as the case may be. Since many farms are smaller, your ancestor may have owned the NW1/4 NW/14 Section 25. This refers to land in the northwest quarter of the northwest quarter. Obviously, each quarter section has the following parts: northwest, northeast, southeast, southwest. Any tract designated by quarter sections by definition contains 40 acres. Any part of a section can be broken down into sixteen different quarter sections each containing 40 acres. (The History of Switzerland County contains a great map illustrating this system.)
Because farms spanned different sections, your ancestor’s 80 acres may have included the 40 acres in NW1/4 NW1/4 Section 25 and the neighboring 40 acres in the adjoining NE1/4 NE1/4 Section 26. (Because of the numbering system Section 26 will always border Section 25 on the west. And by the way, the technical term for the NW1/4 etc, designations are aliquot parts.)
One wrinkle on this is when a section intersects a boundary, either natural, like the Ohio River, or artificial, like a survey line. This creates sections of less than 640 acres, called fractional sections, and there are many fractional sections along the Ohio River. Some Congressional Townships are incomplete (they have less than 36 sections) because the land would fall in the river or into Kentucky. But the numbering system is drawn AS IF those sections actually existed. For example, in the southern part of Craig Township in Switzerland County, Township 1N Range 3W contains only two fractional sections 5 and 6, because of their neighboring the Ohio River. The rest of the 36 sections in this Congressional township would be in Kentucky if they actually existed. Similarly, in Jefferson County, Twp. 3N Range 11E contains only two small fractional sections, one containing Brooksburg and a fractional section adjoining it on the west.
Remember that township and range numbers have officially nothing to do with county boundaries. Often, county boundaries were drawn to coincide with the line separating one range from another or one township from another. But not always. (And if they always coincided, all counties would be perfectly square except where they bordered another state or a body of water.)
Switzerland County presents a much trickier problem than Jefferson, because two separate survey lines traverse it. This means that there are three different sets of township and range numbers for this relatively small area. The first principal meridian runs through Posey Township. This meridian is a north-south survey line used to determine the number of all the townships and ranges to the east and west of it. Because of this, the extreme eastern part of Switzerland County is number in ranges from 1N to 3N. The small amount of land east of the meridian is all in Range 1E. And because of the Ohio River, this Congressional Township is incomplete. There are only two complete sections and eight fractional sections within Twp. 1N Range 1E.
Most of Switzerland County falls in ranges 4W to 1W (from west to east) and townships 1N to 4N (from south to north). This area includes all of Jefferson, Cotton, and York Townships, most of Posey and Craig Township, and about half of Pleasant Township.
The most confusing part for any researcher occurs in western Switzerland County where the Greenville Treaty line slashes diagonally NE to SW to the Ohio River at lamb. Further north, it forms the western boundary of Dearborn County. In Switzerland County it slices through Pleasant Township and Craig Township. This line essentially cuts off the neat numbering system that is used in the rest of the county.
Everything to the west of the line is in Range 12E, as are the eastern sections of Shelby and Milton Townships in Jefferson County. The areas of Craig and Pleasant Township to the west of the treaty line and east of the Jefferson County border have townships number from 4N to 5N, again as in Jefferson County. Since the Greenville line runs diagonally, it created many fractional sections along its length. For example in Craig Township, a sliver of land exists in fractional Section 14 Twp. 4N Range 12E Twp.4N, adjoining the treaty line on the west. It borders a slightly larger fractional Section 36 Twp. 2N Range 4W, which adjoins the treaty line on the east. One other wrinkle, the northernmost tier of sections in Pleasant Township are in Township 6N Range 12E. This part of Pleasant Township is the remnant of Ross Township. The remainder of Ross once extended nearly to Cross Plains, but was made a part of Ripley County long ago.
Jefferson County INGenWeb.
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