Wordless Wednesday - Golden Gate Bridge

Photo by Patrick L Jones - 12 March 2011

Tuesday's Tip - Using Bureau of Land Management records

The US Department of the Interior maintains a very useful website called the Bureau of Land Management General Land Office records automation website. The GLO records contain more than five million Federal land title records issued from 1820 to the present, as well as survey plats and field notes dating to 1810.

One can search by state and county, and also by name and land description. This site has been incredibly helpful in my research, and it is a wonderful compliment to records found through other sources. The GLO records are also free.

Example - Henry Donham Lee Lambert's Oklahoma Land Patent
Here is an example of a search. I know my 3rd-great-grandfather Henry Donham Lee Lambert was in Oklahoma by 1892. In my GLO records search, I chose Oklahoma for the state and Oklahoma County. Then I entered Lambert for last name and hit the orange Search Patents button at the bottom.

This search returned three entries in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma with the last name Lambert: Henry D L Lambert, Robert A Lambert, and William J Lambert. I'll file the other two Lamberts away for later, as they may be related. By clicking the result for Henry, it shows the patent details. It was issued in the Guthrie, Oklahoma land office on 28 November 1900. I can open and download pdf image of the actual land patent (Blogger doesn't permit me to upload pdfs, so I had to convert the pdf to a jpg and cut it in half, see below):

This shows that Henry's land patent was 160 acres. Another interesting detail is the description of the land and its distance from "Indian Meridian in Oklahoma." Read more about the Indian Meridian on the Oklahoma Historical Society's Chronicles of Oklahoma, Volume 5, Number 3 from September 1927 by Alvin Rucker (see http://digital.library.okstate.edu/Chronicles/v005/v005p328.html).

Back to the Land Records site, if you click on the Related Documents tab, you can also see what other documents match the land description for the particular record.

I went back and ran a more general search for the whole state of Oklahoma with last name Lambert. There were three pages of hits, but in doing so, I confirmed there were no other land patents for Henry Donham Lee Lambert. I did find several for William L Lambert, son of Henry and younger brother of my 2nd-great-grandmother, Matilda Jane Lambert O'Brien.

I also looked at surrounding states to see if Henry had obtained other land patents as he and the family made their way west from Illinois. This did not turn up additional records for Henry, but I did find three land patents for Henry's father, Clayton Lambert, in Vigo County, Indiana on 1 October 1835. I'll have more on that later.

Mappy Monday - David Armstrong in Boone County, Indiana

This is a portion the map from Jefferson Township in Boone County, Indiana in 1878. The original is part of Ancestry's US Indexed County Land Ownership Maps, 1860-1918 (original microfilmed by the Library of Congress in Washington, DC).

My 3rd-great-grandfather David Armstrong owned land in the upper left corner of the map, on the border of Jefferson Township. He also owned the tile factory across the street from his land. In the 1880 US Census, David Armstrong employed a number of the neighboring men in the tile factory, including O.S. Booher (age 20), James Jones (age 25), William Daniels (age 15), and James McDuffie (age 34).

 Here is a modern view of Jefferson Township via Google Maps (ignore the placement of the A pin on the map, this pinpoints Jefferson Township only). By my comparison of the Google map to the 1878 map, David Armstrong's land should be at the intersection of W 400 N and N 1050 W. I switched to Satellite view, and the property matches up. It also looks like there is a house on the property that may have been David Armstrong's. For now, the land is still used for farming. Maybe I can get back to Wabash in the near future and stop by the old Armstrong homestead.

David's daughter, Sarah Ellen Armstrong, later married my 2nd-great-grandfather, Thomas Robert Jones, on 17 July 1887.

I will have more on David, and his wife Easter Vail, in a subsequent post.

Writing Reminders for March

At the beginning of February I posted some writing reminders, and found it quite helpful. For such a short month, it's surprising to see that I am already up to 41 posts in February. I'm not sure if I'll keep that pace in March, as I'll be home 14 of 31 days. It does help that in many cases I am pulling from research that exists in Word format or my tree on Ancestry.

Here are some stories I am aiming to bring to the blog in March:
- My great-grandma Lois (Elizabeth Lois Whitley)
- Blanche Lamon O'Brien
- More on Thomas Jones (1778-1857), his wife, Nancy Tucker Jones in Jefferson County, TN
- Thornhills in Culpeper, Virginia
- March birthdays in my family (there are quite a few)
- The children of Joseph Thomas Jones & Mary Katherine Green
- The Whitley/Wheatley family of Culpeper, Virginia
- David Armstrong
- Easter Vail Armstrong
- California connections
- Friday Photos from locations I'll be in March (Florida, Costa Rica, California)
- Looking ahead to the 1940 US Census

Boat Building Workshop at the Indiana State Museum

My Dad has been building wooden boats for a long time, and he's now teaching an eight week course at the Indiana State Museum in Downtown Indianapolis. The class is conducted on Saturdays from 9am-Noon through mid April. They use no power tools and work using traditional methods. Dad also covers Indiana's small boat building history. See http://www.indianamuseum.org/visit/events/eventview.asp?eventid=1788.

I am hoping the class gets covered in the Indianapolis Star or other local media. In the meantime I'll try to post pictures of their progress as he sends them to me.

In the summer, Dad's class will be offered at Eagle Creek Park. His website is located at SailingAfternoons.com.

The O'Brien family on Dad's side has a history connected to boating, the White River and Broad Ripple in Indianapolis. I'll have more on that in March/April.