The Bureau of Land Management Website

When I first received Nicholas Dell’s warrant application (see yesterday's blog), I was very surprised to discover that he had been issued a warrant for 40 acres of bounty land. I knew there was no bounty land in Maryland, yet Nicholas had remained in Maryland all his life. What became of that land, I wondered.

In Barbara Dell’s application, she stated that Nicholas had “disposed of” his land legally. That led to many questions: Where was the land located? Who received it? Could it have been one of Nicholas’s heirs? I knew his oldest son had moved to Illinois, but that was before the warrant was issued in 1853.

It was only recently that I was able to find the answers to those questions. When a soldier received a warrant, he was issued a patent for the land by the federal government. If the soldier had transferred the warrant to someone else, though, his name would appear on the patent as the assignee, and the patent would be made out to the person who received the warrant from the soldier.

These “General Land Office Records” are kept by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”). The BLM has a very useful website for locating these records: https://glorecords.blm.gov/default.aspx

I had used this website before to search for land records, but I only recently discovered that I could search for military bounty-land warrants on the site. It took some experimenting, but I finally figured out that I could enter the warrant number (from the warrant application file) into the search engine next to “Document #.” Since I didn’t know the location of the land, I selected “Any State,” and clicked “Search Patents”:

There were 3 entries that matched Nicholas Dell’s warrant number of 59,718:

I clicked on the Accession number for Nicholas Dill [sic], which brought up the patent details for the land:

This page gave the full description of the land, which was in Lawrence County, Illinois, in Section 10 of Township 3 North, Range 13 West. Selecting the “Patent Image” tab at the top of the screen brought up a digital image of the patent:

With this document, I was able to answer my questions about where Nicholas Dell’s land was located (Illinois) and who received it (Miles White). It was common for soldiers to sell their bounty land to others, usually through an agent. This was the case with Nicholas Dell. He assigned his land to Miles White, who was a very wealthy Baltimore merchant.

Nicholas Dell was not the only one who sold his land to Miles White. There are over 1,000 entries for White in the BLM records, as he bought up land all over the country. In 1870, he owned real estate valued at 1 million dollars, and at his death (about 1876) his estate was valued at 2.5 million dollars!

I was also able to locate the patent for Barbara Dell’s land, using the same method as above. Her land was located in Minnesota. Like Nicholas, she assigned her warrant. Her warrant was assigned to a man named Patrick Fox, who then assigned the warrant to Leander Smith.

If you find your ancestor in the warrant index on Fold3, be sure to check out the BLM website for more information about the land. This is especially important if your ancestor actually used the patent for himself rather than assigning it to someone else.

In my next blog, I'll explain how to locate your ancestor's land and warrant number if he is not in the index on Fold3 yet (i.e. his surname begins with M-Z).