Survey/Field notes question

We have hired a surveyor to locate
a boundary between our ranches. My
second cousins want to sell and we
need to get this done.

Our great grandfather bought our
ranch in 1892. His brother bought
the one to the south. It is a
metes and bounds description in
chains based on an earlier survey
and was originally a Mexican land
grant. He seems to be very busy
and can not work on it often. The
surveyor has been out two times
and taken shots on some fence
lines. He seems to be kind of
befuddled and is not coming back
until March. He has promised a
preliminary map which he has not
done yet.

I have urged him to consult field
notes from some of the old
surveys. I have been of the
understanding that most surveys
had field notes associated with
them that are only available to
licensed surveyors. He claims the
county does not keep these
records.

I have studied this extensively
for the last 60 years but was
stopped by lack of access to the
field notes. The line is close to
our buildings. There has always
been a question as to whether the
barn was on our side or theirs.
Great grandfather is said to have
built the barn. The brothers may
have shared the barn, I don't
know.

The county has an online map that
line seems to move.The surveyor
agreed it is probably inaccurate.
It is now including more buildings
and approaching the house. We have
agreed to do a lot line adjustment
if necessary but we still need to
locate those points.

Is there anyone out there that
would have any insight.

That would be a very good Idea. We had one done on my mothers house. When she died. The original one was done in 1915. By a man that must have been drunk. Nothing was correct.

Surely the other surrounding properties have been surveyed and modernly wrote in stone (so to speak) since 1892. Is what I'm getting at, is you might be better off to start out with some modernly known reference points, and go from there. If your going to draw a line straight up the middle of some place, you can't use reference points that are no longer there, or perhaps weren't even there to begin with the way it sounds. Bottom line is, that you can't make a puzzle piece larger than it is, and you can't change something that has already been legally surveyed and acknowledged by law. And you can't change those such boundaries. So you might as well go outward to a modernly known boundary, use that as a reference point, survey inward from there. Your going to have to respect that outer known boundary ANYWAYS at the conclusion of your own survey.

Well that silly surveyor in 1915 shoulda hooked up to the closest satellite and done it more accurately. He probably forgot since he had too much to drink.

Can you and your cousins agree where you think the line is or should be. If you can, have the surveyor put in pins on that line and record a boundary agreement. From that point forward that is the line, regardless of what the old deeds say. Maybe some money has to change hands between you and your cousins, but that might be less than spending a lot on surveyors

IMHO, it sounds like your current surveyor only knows how to read a GPS map and either doesn't know how to reserch archives for original survey notes or is too busy (lazy?) to learn how to do it. After many years working with surveyors, the new kids on the block often don't have a clue how to do research work that is often needed. I'm not sure they're taught how to do it at surveyor schools an more.

I'm sure this is frustrating Tom and like most subjects, a lot of us here on the forum know more about the rules and regulations in your area (over the last 130 years) than the people who are currently responsible for getting it done. Just because the people dealing with it now don't get it done in an afternoon, doesn't mean they are befuddled or confused, I think you have to give them a chance. Unlike 100 years ago, I'm sure they have all kinds of things on their plates to get done and your situation just lines up with the rest so patience is the advice I would pass along. I'm sure the presence of buildings alone is something which they don't want to mess up this time around. Good luck with whatever happens and let us know eventually how it all worked out for you.

Is there a surveyor in your area that ha been there a long time and possibly bought the records of some surveyor before him? I have a similar deal with the land up on the mountain,its never been an issue because all parties involved don't worry about it,but probably will some day.Also I was told by a lawyer that if a boundary has been agreed on by both landowners for over 100 years that becomes the legal boundary regardless of what the deeds say.

Here in Tennessee it is pretty well if the two parties have agreed on the line for anything over 7 years it stands . Some times courts will side with what is written but most times if there has been an agreement and neither party complained in the past they go with what has been agreed .I have never seen field notes of surveyors carry any weight jut the final plat and description. Really coming into play not with the more accurate surveys .

In my County in Calif the County doesn't necessarily keep track of all surveyors notes. They rely on the filed Survey Map or Record of Survey which they review extensively before they give the OK to have the map filed. They check for closure, agreement with other maps in the area, etc. They keep the field notes for surveys performed by County crews, but those are almost never boundary surveys, generally Topo, construction, etc.

Outside of the field work of reading and retracing a property description, there is a lot of research that goes into trying to determine where the actual line is at or the most likely place that a judge would determine that it is at. Boundary survey is a lot like the law and there are all sorts of precedents from prior work and decisions.

Boundary surveys are a very specialized part of surveying which is why a Civil Engineer can perform most surveying functions - layout, topo, construction for buildings, roads, pipelines, etc. - everything but boundary surveys. For that you need to be a licensed surveyor

His delay may be do to other work that is more pressing

I thought surveys were accurate. No, they were close enough when they were done. If a modern surveyor researches the description he may have a lot to interpret. Our farm was described as to the bottom of Graves Gutter in one section and equally obtuse in other line. Our surveyor pushed everything to the limit our way and said as much as two acres could be in gray areas. First to record becomes the line unless contested, but later lines would probably accept his. In very old cases the first interpreter usually wins. If every one agrees all is good.

Hope you don't have luck like I've had. Trying to sell niece 6 acres for a house. No problems with boundaries just the surveyor. Been 11 months and still no steaks in the ground. Then there's the jerks in the court house. For 4 months said it was ok to build Then they said no she needs .250 more acres that is not in the flood plain. At the 100 year flood level the water on that .250 acres would be 6 inches deep. I could build a house on 1 acre and still have more ground I would want to mow

(quoted from post at 15:58:45 01/27/22) Surely the other surrounding properties have been surveyed and modernly wrote in stone (so to speak) since 1892. Is what I'm getting at, is you might be better off to start out with some modernly known reference points, and go from there. If your going to draw a line straight up the middle of some place, you can't use reference points that are no longer there, or perhaps weren't even there to begin with the way it sounds. Bottom line is, that you can't make a puzzle piece larger than it is, and you can't change something that has already been legally surveyed and acknowledged by law. And you can't change those such boundaries. So you might as well go outward to a modernly known boundary, use that as a reference point, survey inward from there. Your going to have to respect that outer known boundary ANYWAYS at the conclusion of your own survey.

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ounds good to me.

Here on the other end of the country I've never heard of that. What is important here in the Fingerlakes area of central NY, which was surveyed and divided up as pay for Revolutionary War veterans, is the abstract of title. This is a description of the property and its lines, and any history involved. Often kept in lawyers offices, but I have all of mine. This is NOT publicly available information, as there are NO copies. Deeds are filed with the county clerk, and are public information.

1500 miles east of you our land boundaries/ surveys are based on sections of land (160 acres) and not metes & bounds. A survey usually describes a starting reference point on the land deed here.. This would be a section corner which the surveyor found to reference his survey description which might be a mile or two miles from your property. Then then surveyor states the property being surveyed is so many feet north, so many feet east , so many feet south and so many feet west back to the starting point. Then that equals so many acres which is listed in the surveyors description. Have never heard of surveyor field notes available from the courthouse or to the public. Surveyors of old used chains to manually measure land parcels. My understanding today surveyors use GPS signals from satellites coming to their instruments. Instruments would not work on cloudy days from lack of signal. GPS survey is supposedly much more accurate than the old manual measured chain surveys. The GPs survey may not agree with the property lines in the old property description. But they will likely be be close. With all the variables involved it could take some time before a land survey is completed.

Willow Lane below has a workable solution. If there is no agreement between the parties then there will be disagreement. Lay out the line in an agreeable location. Call in the surveyor to tie in the line to whatever he can get recorded and its done. Ohio has something in registered Land. A procedure where your surveyor runs the lines and a proposed description is filed with a court. After a period of time if no objecting surveys are presented then a new description is approved. Surveying very old properties can require lots of judgment.

Where an old survey can come in to play is a situation like I had a few years ago.The new to the area fellow surveyed a property on the backside of mine and came up about 75 ft on my side.The root cause was he was using the measurement from a state road,the problem was when the measurements were first put in the deed in the 1800's the road was about 75 ft different from what it is now and it was changed around 1900.A local surveyor had a bunch of old survey records and they were referred to to get things straight.

Thank you for all your comments. It has been a great discussion.
I probably should not have used the word befuddled. This surveyor is the only one we could find that would take the job. Our side is in no hurry. The others want to sell but I don't think they are in a hurry either.

I do not question his abilities, I would just like to help him locate the original points. I have already proposed we do a lot line adjustment if necessary. If we have been using their land for the last sixty years, we are willing and able to pay for it.

He has been searching for a point on a recent survey. It is about 1/2 mile away so I have somewhat dismissed it. I guess that is where he proposes to tie in. I guess with modern survey methods it is not a problem.

I am trying to handle this from a distance. We have a lot of old deeds and maps but I can't access them right now. My sister's husband just passed away so I am not going to ask her to look for that stuff right now. Maybe it is just as well that it takes a while. The surveyor is really good with email so that is a good thing. I will report back with with the next exciting chapter.

I think this is similar to our problem. The ranches were surveyed with Pescadero Spanish Town Rd as the Western boundary. The county road, now Stage Rd was built in 1916. Great grandfather had retired and moved to San Mateo by then. I suspect the county has superimposed the description on Stage Rd and that is what screws up the online map.

I'm a geezer in Indiana, and will toss in my two cents worth of comments.

The online maps you see are part of a Geographical Information System (GIS). These are created by taking a series of aerial or satellite photos that have been pieced together to cover a larger area. I am guessing that many GIS's are based on Google Earth. There is some degree of distortion created in this process which translates photos of a round globe into a flat map. The various lines you see imposed on the aerial photos are added from a variety of different sources using a variety of methods by a variety of people. When you see lines move, I assume you saying the lines appear to be in different positions relative the aerial photos taken at different time. This may happen because someone changed the gridwork of lines that were superimposed on the aerial photos, or because the unchanged gridwork of lines were superimposed on a different aerial photo (which might have had different distortions) in a slightly different fashion.

A boundary survey is not as simple as it might seem at first blush. A person is likely to think that all a surveyor has to do is to read a single deed and drive stakes in the ground at appropriate places that correspond with the legal description. The surveyor's duty is actually to drive the stakes at what he/she determines to be the boundary of ownership. (Where should the stakes be placed is the adjoining landowner's deed describes the common boundary differently? There may be an overlap or gap between the two properties. What happens when some previous owner of a 1,000 acre ranch sells 500 acres to one party, then sells 550 acres to another party? Many states have laws stating that after a fence has been used as a boundary line for X years without any party objecting, it becomes the property line regardless of the legal descriptions on either deed.) A surveyor acquaintance once told me that he spends more time at the courthouse than he does on the property he is surveying. He defined the number one rule in surveying as It depends. The existence of a fence corner post may take precedence over a legal description. In some states, the payment of property taxes for XX years may determine ownership. Which party has been paying property tax on the barn in question??

The suggestion to create a new property line at whatever location is agreed upon has merit, but still may require a surveyor to write a legal description of this line and satisfy whatever the requirements are in your location.

Many states have (or used to have) what was called a legal survey. The process was basically to identify all parties that may have any interest in the land, get them all to agree to have a survey performed and abide by the results of the survey, then to record the survey. Many surveys are recorded, and many are not. If a survey was made as part of the process of creating a new subdivision in an urban are, it will be recorded. If a rural owner just wants his corners marked for his own use, the survey may not be recorded. I own some land in a small poor rural county. I have been told that all the old survey records were hauled to a landfill decades ago. The best way to determine what is available is to ask the county recorder and/or surveyor. They are more like to have better answers than the members of this forum.

I know of a couple case where the on line maps had property lines in the wrong place,according to the forester that handled my timber sale he runs into that all the time.

The chains would measure out differently than the moden way with tools that shoot a straght line and measure that where the chains would very in if you were on totally flat land like the modern instruments do to the chain carrier walking up and down hills and valles and even walking off to the side one way or the others. Can you walk a perfectlay straight line for a quarter mile? Dought it. And it could depend on how tight the serveryer crew pulled that chain. Over hill and down valle will add distance to just a straight sight line. I have no idea if you are on totally flat lant or if you have hills or even if in mountains So that could change how the chaines were pulled for those old survayes.

Ditto what Leroy stated. That brings back memories of me dragging a survey chain & utilizing stakes in an agriculture class at college. I hate dealing with surveyor's. I've been attempting to get 29.66 acres surveyed into 3 tracts so I can deed it to my children. Land & houses are selling so rapidly where I live no surveyor has the time or desires an exorbitant amount of $$$$$$.

One surveyor quoted me $7500 for surveying my 29.66 acres of land. I told him no way Jose.

(quoted from post at 09:35:55 01/28/22) The chains would measure out differently than the moden way with tools that shoot a straght line and measure that where the chains would very in if you were on totally flat land like the modern instruments do to the chain carrier walking up and down hills and valles and even walking off to the side one way or the others. Can you walk a perfectlay straight line for a quarter mile? Dought it. And it could depend on how tight the serveryer crew pulled that chain. Over hill and down valle will add distance to just a straight sight line. I have no idea if you are on totally flat lant or if you have hills or even if in mountains So that could change how the chaines were pulled for those old survayes.

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ears ago I was a land surveyor in MA. We measured every thing with steel tape that had to be level, so like steps up hill and down. The tape also had to be corrected for temp.
We researched old deeds that had decriptions like " three shoots of an arrow" or "as far as man can walk in a day" or to the center of a "36 inch oak". We also found lines by finding old stones that were the base for angles of a "virgina rail fence" This was all in the Berkshires of Western MA. Very old farm land, now all woods.

That steel tape would have come later than the chains used in the 1800' like when things were measured here. I remember Grandpa telling about helping drag the chain when he was a boy and he died45 years ago at age 99. My area was fairly flat but go 25 mile away areas you would have had to be a mountain climer to get over that area and then drop down into a river. No way could they get an acurate measure there but them 30 mile the other way perfectlt flat so could get good measure there just walking. That is if you did not have to work arounf trees.

You in a Heap o trouble boy. Old Deeds are very vague. Can you get your cousins to meet with you on the property and agree to boundries?

Our county GIS information has the property line running down the middle of our driveway and through the middle of the garage. The fence line is 30 feet away. Originally one person owned a lot of this land, and gave some of it to his children. They didn't survey, just planted a fence and said "this is yours, this is yours" etc. So no recording of the now changed property lines.
Took our surveyor about three months to come up with the actual property lines, which coincided with the county's information. A lot of the pins were missing. The fence has been in place for over 20 years, but no one knew where the actual line was. Trying to get the affected parties to sign quit-claim deeds to the portion of land on "our" side of the fence.
Complications, as one party (on the existing deed) is now married and they are using the property as collateral for a loan. So, the bank is now involved. Fun times.
Mostly, now, just waiting for all the parties to conclude their part of the dealings and have our lawyer file the paperwork. Might take another couple of months. We have plenty of time (we think).
Just keep track of ALL dealing with the parties, bank, surveyor, lawyer, etc. Dates, times, gist of what was discussed, and so forth.

In Idaho, and many of my surrounding states, the licensed surveyors start from an existing, accepted monumented point, which is usually a section corner, or a 1/4 corner. There's a lot of government land and therefore government surveys in this part of the country. Therefore a lot of accepted, existing survey monuments. It sounds like that's the way your surveyor is working it. They find that monument, and then its a matter of doing the plain geometry to establish where your corners should be. Then, if they cannot recover your monuments, they will set pins using high end gps telemetry, which is a lot more accurate than a chain and transit. You are also going to be dealing with your outside boundaries against your other neighbors, unless those boundaries are well monumented and established. On a recent survey, my guy found 5 monuments designating one corner. The GPS set the 6th one based on GPS from a known section corner (within a couple of inches of one of the others). They were all within 15 feet of each other. Keep us posted. steve