In short no.
Look I've spent years working with my Dad surveying it always comes the same way.
First let me note that although the GPS units can be plenty accurate for what you want, subfoot accuracy is not uncommon, it won't help a danged bit. It won't help because I suspect since the old surveys are quite old they probably reference things like "The big oak tree" or "over by the crick" and therefore don't amount to a hill of beans.Okay, that said theres millions of ways to "properly" locate a piece of land and people have been fighting about it for centuries. This is not something the USA has a corner on, the English and Europeans have problems sometimes 1000 years older than ours.
#1 So you can figure your land based on your neighbors. Figure out all their lines, and you're in the middle. If you don't trust your neighbors this is a lousy situation.
#b figure out your land from "big" landmarks. Like roads, watertowers, bridges. If you don't trust your town/city this is also a lousy situation.
#3 figure out your land from "natural" landmarks. Rivers, hills, ridges. This is a lousy situation, natural landmarks change all the time, its a constant. So what do you do? Well a good surveyor will try to take instances of all 3 options and make them work. Lots of times one or more pieces won't work, for example one neighbor won't fit. In which case you take the neighbor's plot and fit it in with the other things independantly, which will often give you a basis of error you apply to the whole thing to make it work. Contrary to most popular opinion survey work isn't perfect. Even a really good TBM system is only good to 0.001" per 100 feet. So if you do a couple miles or a couple hundred miles its easy to start getting into error of a couple feet. Sure you close loops and stuff to work some of the error out, but its never perfect. I did a job for dad finishing a golf course. There was one little wedge of land left and we had to set a bunch of monuments. I ended up with 4-5' of error in that. Just set the monument halfway and call it close enough, nothing we could do about it. That error was built out of 15 years of project development on 3 computer systems, and probably 200 miles of shots taken. We did the best we could, it just worked out that way...
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