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Do you have an ancestor’s deed or land patent? The strange-looking land description
containing letters and fractions is called “aliquot parts.” If you can decode the
description, you’ll be able to figure out exactly where your ancestor’s land was.

Aliquot parts is an important element in the public land survey system (PLSS), also
called the rectangular survey system, which was used to survey and divvy up land starting
shortly after the Revolutionary War.

States with land surveyed under the PLSS, called Public Land States, are Alabama,
Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana,
Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska,
Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington,
Wisconsin and Wyoming.

That’s everything except the original 13 states, Maine, Vermont, West Virginia, Kentucky,
Tennessee, Texas and Hawaii. (Parts of Ohio were surveyed with the old metes-and-bounds
system, too.)  

The PLSS established principal meridians—imaginary north-south lines—to serve as the
starting point for surveying each 24×24-mile tract. A tract is divided into 16 townships;
townships (23,040 acres) contain 36 sections, each 1 square mile (640 acres), like
this: 

A section could be split into halves, quarters or other parts. A description of your
ancestor’s subdivision on a land record might look like N½ SW¼, which you’d
read as “the north half of the southwest quarter.”

Here’s an example of how land might be divided and described in aliquot parts:

This free FamilyTreeMagazine.com
article has more information about the PLSS and the Bureau of Land Management’s free
federal land patent site.

One of the video sessions in Family Tree University’s Summer
2011 Virtual Conference, Aug. 19-21, is Diana Crisman Smith’s demo on platting
your ancestors’ properties using PLSS. Learn
more about the conference and register here.