Warrants, surveys and patents, with tracts identified by name. Here is what the legal description on your deed, lease or division order is actually telling you, and where to check it for free.
Pennsylvania uses metes and bounds. Warrants, surveys and patents, with tracts identified by name.
Pennsylvania never entered the federal rectangular survey and has no principal meridian. Land was granted by the Penn proprietors and then by the Commonwealth through its own Land Office, so there is no township, range or section anywhere in a Pennsylvania description.
An application was the request to purchase. A warrant was authority to survey a stated quantity, and the warrant system became standard after 1733, with earlier purchases held under what are called Old Rights. A survey was the tract actually run on the ground, with official copies in the Copied Survey Books. A patent was the Commonwealth's conveyance of title.
Pennsylvania surveys were identified by tract name rather than by owner name, and the State Archives keeps a Tract Name Index arranged by patent tract name. Warrantee township maps show the warrant tracts lying against one another across a whole township, and they are the practical tool for putting an old warrant on the ground.
Beginning at a white oak on the west bank of Pine Creek; thence North 42 degrees East, 68 perches to a chestnut; thence South 51 degrees East, 112 perches to a heap of stones; thence to the place of beginning, containing 214 acres and allowance of six per cent for roads. A perch is a rod, 16 and a half feet, and the six per cent allowance is ordinary in Pennsylvania warrants. This is written to correct form as an illustration, not quoted from a recorded instrument.
To trace a Pennsylvania tract you need three things: the full name of the purchaser, the county as it existed at the time of purchase, and the approximate date. Because the county boundary at the time of the warrant governs where the record lives, and Pennsylvania counties were subdivided repeatedly, an heir searching only the modern county will often find nothing at all. The tract name, not the family name, is usually the only identifier that survives two centuries of conveyances.
Deeds are with the county Recorders of Deeds.
What it covers, how many net mineral acres it actually is, and whether anything is producing on it. Free, no obligation, and the answer does not change if you never sell anything to us. We do this every day and it usually takes us an hour.
Ask a Landman Get a Free ValuationCompiled from BLM, state land offices, state archives and statute, current as of 2026-08. Berlin Royalties is a mineral buyer and a landman shop in Tulsa, not a law firm or a licensed surveyor. Nothing here is a boundary opinion, and a description that matters to a transaction should be run by a title attorney or a licensed surveyor in the state where the land sits.