The Legal Land Description System. Any genealogist who examines deeds in most of the United States must come to term with legal land descriptions. 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. This article covers much of the same ground but will apply the discussion to Jefferson and Switzerland Counties. 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.