At the back: words, further reading and about this manual
The words used
Words you will meet in reports and county offices. Knowing Your Land explains each at greater length.
Account number. The county assessor's number for a property's tax account. The site cannot look land up by it yet.
Air photo. A photograph taken looking straight down from an airplane. Oregon's begin in the 1930s.
Area history. A report on a whole section, or the land around a point, made when the site cannot outline your lot.
Bearing. A compass direction written from north or south toward east or west. "S 23° W" means face south, then turn 23 degrees toward the west.
Bearing tree. A tree the surveyor marked beside a corner post and recorded, so the corner could be found again. Also called a witness tree.
Chain. The surveyor's measuring chain, 66 feet long, made of 100 links. Eighty chains make a mile.
Claim plat. A survey map that shows the donation land claims in a township, each with its owner's name and number.
Donation land claim. Land given to early settlers of Oregon under the Donation Land Act of 1850. Claims could be started until 1855.
Field notes. The notebooks that government surveyors kept as they walked the lines.
General Land Office. The federal office that surveyed public land and issued patents from 1812 to 1946; its records are now the Bureau of Land Management's.
Homestead. Land granted under the Homestead Act of 1862 to a settler who lived on it and worked it for five years.
Land patent. The paper by which the United States passed land to its first private owner.
Legal description. The words in a deed that say exactly which land is meant.
Link. One hundredth of a chain, just under 8 inches.
Map number. The number of the county tax map a tax lot is on. It is built from the township, range and section.
Plat. A survey map. A township plat shows a whole township; a claim plat shows its land claims.
Quarter section. A quarter of a section, 160 acres. A quarter of a quarter is 40 acres.
Range. A column of townships, counted east or west from the Willamette Meridian.
Raised number. The small number after a sentence. Touch it to see the record behind the sentence.
Research list. The errands for your land, grouped by the place where each record is kept.
School sections. Sections 16 and 36 of each township, granted to Oregon for its schools.
Section. A square of land about a mile on a side, 640 acres. A township holds 36.
Tax lot. The unit by which the county taxes land. It is not a legal description, and its lines are not survey lines.
Topographic map. A map that shows the shape of the land with contour lines.
Township. A square of land six miles on a side, counted north or south from the base line.
Treaty. An agreement between the United States and Native nations. Treaties of the 1850s ceded much of western Oregon to the United States.
Willamette Meridian. The north-south line, starting at the Willamette Stone in Portland's West Hills, from which every township and range in Oregon and Washington is counted.
Where to read more in Knowing Your Land
Each part of a report rests on a family of records. Knowing Your Land, by Bob Zybach, gives each family a chapter: what it tells you, where to find it, how to read it and what it costs. Use this table to go from the part you are reading to the chapter that explains it. On the site, "Read first:" links in "If you're hooked" do the same.
| Part of the report | Chapter of Knowing Your Land |
|---|---|
| This land today | 3. Find your legal description, tax lot and acreage; 15. What grew there: plants, forests, fire and crops |
| The ground | 13. Rock, soil and the shape of the land |
| Water and weather | 14. Rain, rivers and the weather people remember |
| The people before the surveyors | 16. The first people on the land |
| The surveyors arrive | 6. The first survey: what the surveyor wrote; 11. Maps and survey plats; 17. What you can see on the ground |
| First owners | 7. How the land left the government |
| The families | 8. Deeds, tax rolls and the chain of owners; 9. Census pages, newspapers, journals and county histories; 18. What people remember, and what families keep |
| Seen from above | 11. Maps and survey plats; 12. Photographs from the ground, the air and space |
| Getting here | 10. Buildings, cemeteries and place names; 20. Following change through time: roads, railroads and land use |
| Timeline | 19. Putting the pieces together |
| If you're hooked: what to do next | 24. If you're hooked: what to do next; 25. An Oregon directory of offices and websites |
| About this report | 19. Putting the pieces together; 5. How the site Your Land History fits with this guide |
| The sample, from beginning to end | 22. One tree farm from beginning to end |
About this manual
This is the adult edition of Your Land History: The User's Manual, version 1.1, October 2026. It describes the website Your Land History, version 1.1, at YourLandHistory.org. It was made from the site's design document, Your Land History: Website Design, version 1.1 (October 10, 2026), and from the site itself. Where the two differ, the site is right, and the next edition of this manual will follow it. Screens change; the pictures here show the site as it was in October 2026.
The reports on the site are put together and written automatically, using AI, from the public records they cite. The first draft of this manual was written the same way, from the design and the site, and the Your Land History project is responsible for it.
Like every report, this manual is about historical research, not title research. Nothing in it tells you who owns a piece of land today or where its boundaries lie.
A Kids edition and a Professional edition may follow, and this edition will be revised as readers say where it fell short. Send corrections to drdavesullivan@gmail.com, or use That's wrong beside any record on the site.
Prepared by the Your Land History project, a project of Dr. Bob Zybach and Dr. Dave Sullivan, with thanks to Oregon Advocates for School Trust Lands and Oregon Websites and Watersheds.