From Ancestry.com Wiki | Land Records This article is part of a
series. |Overview of Land Records| |Survey Systems and Terms|
|Creating a Plat| |Homestead Act of 1862| |Military Bound Land|
|Taxes in Land Research| |English Law in American Land Research|
|List of Useful Resources About Land Records| The U.S.
government has sold or given away more than 1 billion acres of
land (not including Alaska). In the process it granted more than
5 million patents kept in 9,386 bound volumes in the
Springfield, Virginia, office of the Bureau of Land Management
(BLM). An even greater mass of records in the National Archives
represents the paperwork granting those patents. Searching for
the record of a particular land grant from the federal
government requires contacting both the BLM and the National
Archives. To know what to request means understanding something
of how the federal government processed the paperwork. Federal
Land Grants From 1776, when Congress promised land to German
auxiliaries (sometimes incorrectly know