How this works

On June 4, 1851, government surveyors set a cedar post on a ridge in the hills west of Portland, and the measuring of Oregon began. Every township, range and section in Oregon and Washington is counted from that point, now called the Willamette Stone. Surveyors with a compass and a chain 66 feet long walked the lines a mile apart, set a post at every corner, and wrote down trees standing near each post so the corner could be found again. Their notebooks and maps still exist. So do the papers that passed each piece of land to its first owner, the treaties that came before them, the county’s soil and weather records, and nearly a century of air photos.

All of it is public. Little of it is in one place. The records sit in federal, state and county offices and on dozens of websites, many of them written in old handwriting, old units, or the careful language of a land office in 1855.

Your Land History gathers what can be gathered for one piece of land, reads it, and writes it up as a story you can follow, with the record behind every sentence one tap away.

How a report is made

1. You tell us where the land is: its legal description, its tax lot, or its street address.
2. We find it on the government survey grid and show it to you to check.
3. We fetch the public records for that ground: survey maps and field notes, patents, the treaty, geologic and soil maps, weather, old maps and air photos, place names.
4. A computer program reads them and writes each part of the report from them, and every sentence points to its record.
5. You read it. If you’re hooked, the last part tells you where the rest is kept and how to get it.

Where it works

Land anywhere in Oregon. Other states may follow. The list of everything a report can look into is on Everything we can look for.

What it costs

Nothing. There is no account, no payment and no email address to give. An office or archive may charge for its own copies.

Who sees your report

Only people you give its link to. The sample report is public with its owners’ consent. The sample report is Dave and Barb Sullivan’s own land: their tree farm on Kings Valley Highway near Pedee, in Polk County, Oregon. Researching its history with Bob Zybach is what gave them the idea for this site, so we use it as the example: in the software business that is called eating your own dog food.

What it is not

This is historical research, not title research. It does not show who owns this land today or where its legal boundaries lie; for that, ask a title company or a licensed land surveyor.

Reports are written automatically, using AI, from the public records they cite. No person reviews a report before you read it.

Who is behind it

Your Land History is a project of Dr. Bob Zybach and Dr. Dave Sullivan. The research method comes from Oregon Websites and Watersheds; the idea began in the library of Oregon Advocates for School Trust Lands. About

Learning to do it yourself

Knowing Your Land, by Bob Zybach, teaches the method one source at a time. The User’s Manual walks through every screen of this site. Both are on The books.

Sources: The Oregon Encyclopedia, “Willamette Stone and Willamette Meridian”; Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records.