Throughout most of the history of Pennsylvania, its population was made up of land owners.
Since 1682 there has been a land office selling lands of the Commonwealth to private citizens.
There are four types of land records in Pennsylvania, all of which are important to genealogical research in Washington County:
Government transfers to private groups or individuals.
Government transfers as military grants to Revolutionary War veterans.
Lands warranted or patented to private individuals or groups by Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, New York and Connecticut.
Private land transferred to another individual or group.
Maps of lands patented by Pennsylvania to settlers are available from several sources, and such maps exist for Washington County.
But before you use these maps, you will need to understand exactly how lands were obtained from the government.
Also, refer to the section on early history to understand how the government of Pennsylvania, the Ohio Company of Virginia, and the French and Indian Wars played a role in the settling of southwestern Pennsylvania.
The process of acquiring land from the provincial government in the early days of Pennsylvania is known as the application process.
The application process consisted of four steps:
If you wanted to buy a peice of land you first had to make an application
to the land office, specifying how many acres you wanted and providing a rough
description of where the land was located.
Next, a warrant was issued by the land office. The warrant
authorized you, or a provincial officer, to survey the tract.
Once the survey was conducted, the results were returned
to the land office. The survey included a precise description of the tract and an
equally precise map of its boundries. It also included the names of your neighbors
who owned the adjoining tracts.
The last step in the process happened six months after the survey, when you
finally paid for the land. At this time you were issued a patent
which officially gave you clear title to the land.
Despite there being such a well-defined method for acquiring land, the application
process was not rigidly followed by everyone. For one thing, the time at which
the land was to be payed for was apt to change. As a result, many settlers never
payed for their land.
Another problem was that some settlers took the first two or three steps
in the process, but would never complete the transaction by acquiring the patent.
In these cases, however, just the fact that they had settled there first protected
the settler against claims from later buyers.
The third problem with the application process was that the land office simply
did not have the personel to administer the process.
Where to find these records
The originals of these records are in the possession of the Pennsylvania Division of Land Records and in the Pennsylvania State Archives.
The Washington County land warrant maps make note, for each tract, if the warrant was under a Virginia Certificate. Original records for the many Virginia Certificates can be found at the West Virginia Historical Archives in Morgnatown, WV.
Government Transfers to Individuals