By Tina Barton

Most of the Maryland land records have been scanned and are available on line at mdlandrec.net ; https://landrec.msa.maryland.gov/Pages/Login.aspx

Create yourself an account. It’s free.

Using some ancestry sites like familysearch is useful too – that is free. I use ancestry.com because I pay for it. But sometimes genealogy and land record searches go hand in hand.

One more thing to be aware of. If you are looking in Howard County, you need to know that it used to be part of Anne Arundel County until 1841. So once you get deep enough into history, you need to switch from searching in Howard County to searching in Anne Arundel. This is probably true for a lot of counties, so know your county history or you will go through some unnecessary rabbit holes.

Here are a few scenarios: (1) You want to track the deeds as far back as you can from a known address. (2) You want to investigate land holdings of a particular person in history. (3) You want to investigate land holdings of a particular person present day, or later 20th century. Let’s go through all 3 scenarios one by one.

Scenario 1: You want to track the deeds as far back as you can from a known address

Suppose the land your house is on is interesting to you and you want to track its history. We’ll use the Brumbaugh House as an example. The address is 5825 Main Street, Elkridge MD in Howard County.

1. Bring up the SDAT database, https://sdat.dat.maryland.gov/RealProperty/Pages/default.aspx (I usually google SDAT Maryland and it is the first link. Find your property in that database.

i. Choose the county (Howard in my case)

ii. Choose “Street Address”

iii. Click Continue

iv. Enter the street number (5825 in my case) in the Street Number Box and the street name, just the name, not “St., Rd., ….” so “Main” in my case. Click Next. You might get multiple results, as I do, and I don’t know why because they both look the same. Click on the correct one. If you don’t know which one, try them all until you get data that looks right. In my case, the first one is fine, but the second one shows Dr. Brumbaugh as the seller (it was his estate) so I like that one better.

v. Scroll down to Transfer Information (there’s all kinds of interesting tax related info about the property but we are trying to track deeds)

vi. Look for the oldest deed in the Transfer Information. In my case it is Deed1: /01465/ 00405. Strip off all the leading zeroes. You are looking for Deed book (also called Liber) 1465 (the first number) and Page (or Folio) 405. 

vii. Note the date also for that deed. In my case it is 04/30/1986.

2. Bring up the Maryland Land Records website and log in

https://landrec.msa.maryland.gov/Pages/Login.aspx

Now they ask for two-factor authorization and they log you out after about 20 minutes of inactivity so it can be annoying, but for a free secure service, I’m not complaining.

3. Choose your County. In my case it is “Howard”.

4. Plug in your Book number (1465 in my case) and Page number (405 in my case) and click “Jump” or hit the Enter key. Both work.

5. It will either bring up your deed directly, or if there are multiple books with that book and page number, choose the correct year and book, and then you should see your deed. If it is not the deed you expect, then you have a typo somewhere. In my case it brings up the deed directly.

6. Read the deed. Believe me, this gets harder when they are hand-written in the historical records. What you are looking for is words like “Being the same property that was conveyed to such and such by such and such and recorded among the Land Records of Howard County (or it might say Anne Arundel) in Liber XXX and Book YYY.” In my case it says

I don’t really care about the deed for Elkridge Heights Road. What I care about is

  Liber 113 Folio 310 in the year 1921. I usually write down the info like:

1921 113/310 Mary V. Earp to Benjamin Bruce Brumbaugh

7. If you want, you can download the deed. You can do it page by page, or the better thing to do is to put the first page number in the “Start” field and the last page number in the “End” field. As long as it is less than 10 pages, you can click Enter and it will bring up the whole deed. You should see a little down-arrow above the deed on the right. Click that to download.

8. Note: There were threats that the Maryland State Archives were going to have to charge us 20 cents per page downloaded, for deeds under 100 years old. Right now they got the funding so it is still free. Download them while they are free!

9. Go back to the land records home page and plug in the Liber (in the Book Field) and the Folio (in the Page Field). Hit Jump or Enter. In my case I went to 113/310 and it jumped right to the next deed in history.

10. Keep going in this way. If you are lucky, you keep going back in time, and you may eventually get back into the early 1800s or even 1700s. But some of those older deeds do not list the Liber and Folio, and then you may have to go to Scenario 2 to learn more.

Note: Lessons Learned: 

Lesson 1: In my case, things got complicated very quickly. The property came from TWO deeds that were joined together, and this being one of my early forays into land records, I went down a huge rabbit hole for the first deed from a Dr. Eareckson, thinking that Dr. Brumbaugh just took over Dr. Eareckson’s house, because we know he took over the practice. In fact, Dr. Eareckson’s widow lived next door, and the previous owner Charles A. R. Earp had to buy a skinny strip of land from Dr. Eareckson for his driveway to his carriage house. So that was the first deed, and it was not at all necessary to trace it, except to understand that this was a very skinny parcel of land. One of my colleagues explained it to me, so I learned that it is actually important to pay attention to the land description too if it veers from the land description in the previous deed.

Lesson 2: Sometimes the previous Liber and Folio are hidden in another court document that is not on-line. It could be in a will. Some wills can be found on line through Family Search. Some are not there and you need to go to Annapolis and get help. In my case, there was a court case involved and I needed to get the court documents to go further back. We paid $50 for each of two documents. One could not be found but there is no refund. The other was found and was very interesting and helpful. If we went to Annapolis ourselves it would have cost us our time and gas, but less than $100. Sometimes you can go to Scenario Two below and search the indices.

Here’s what I had to parse through:

Here’s what I needed to move on:

1896 60/279 John Rogers to Charles A. R. Earp

In looking for 60/279 there were two books to choose from:

Obviously I wanted the older one. This deed is hand written. I see

1889 54/396 Mortgage involving Joseph Wyatt… It says another deed was recorded on “Even Date” – so usually you find it in the pages before the current deed, or the pages after. In this case it was the previous deed. Here’s how it starts.

There was no deed book/page for me to go back further. It was hidden in the court documents. It happens.

What else could we do? We see that the Pettitts are involved in the court case and we can see from the 1860 Martinet Map of District 1 Howard County that Joseph Pettit owned the property I’m tracing, that we call the Brumbaugh House. There were two houses on the property at the time. Now there is only one. In the 1878 Hopkins Map it was owned by Thomas Pettit.

Some genealogy led us to see that Annie Milling was Thomas’s sister. Anne Pettitt was their mother or stepmother. Joseph Pettitt was their father.

This brings us to Scenario 2.

Scenario 2: You know the name of an historical person and you want to see what properties they bought or sold (pre-1965)

This can be very tedious. It helps to know the dates the person lived and assuming they started buying property no sooner than 20 years after that birth date, it gives a range. Here’s some quick armchair genealogy I did. I didn’t bother to verify sources. It’s based mostly on census records.

It’s not really fair… Joseph married Ann and had children by her, and then when she died, he married another woman named Ann! So Annie Pettit in the court case is the stepmother.

Anyway, let’s see some properties that Joseph Pettit bought between 1830 and 1877. I’m not going to do them all.

1. On the Maryland Land Recs website, you see

Click on Indices and choose your County. In my case, my date range spans both AACo and Howard County. I’m going to start with Howard County. I have inside information and I know that Joseph Pettit got this property after it became part of Howard County. This was a long convoluted path I took to get there, with the court documents and all that. When I bring up the Howard County indices, here’s a little screenshot of what I see:

I’m going to look from 1840 to 1877 and no more, and Thomas Pettit (sometimes spelled Pettitt) will be the Grantee because he is BUYING property.

2. To the right, not shown in the screen shot, is a link. Click the one in the top row. Now you see:

3. We want 1840-1920, N-R to find the “P’s”. Find the link to the right of that row. Since we are in the “N’s” to start with, you want to skip the N’s and O’s so try jumping to page 20 etc. In fact, the Ps start on page 21. Not bad for a guess!

Common names are given at the top with a special index. Pettitt is not one of those so we just have to page forward and look for Pettit or Pettitt. This is a typewritten index so it’s not so hard on the brain. Note that the order is not strictly alphabetical. Somewhere after Pittenger I finally see Pettit and Pettitt.

It’s a lot. My secret information is that he got it from John Butler. But Elijah Conrad also owned the property but defaulted on the mortgage. 

4. The deed book and page are in those rows next to the Grantor’s name. You have to bring up each deed in turn and read the land description to see if you can figure out where the property is.

LESSONS LEARNED: Note that if you go back to the really old indices in Anne Arundel County, they are in Chronological order by recording date. They ARE split by the first letter of the Grantor/Grantee, but they are NOT alphabetical at all. So you will see them scattered throughout the time frame, and hand-written. Talk about a headache. But you can get a lot of good information if you are just patient.

Here’s a case in point. I knew that all the land along Main Street was inheritated by Hannah Hammond (unless it was sold by her father first) and she married Dr. Richard Hopkins. So you can look at these indices for all the land sold by Dr. Richard Hopkins from like 1815 or so to 1825 (when he deed what was left to his children) and find:

Richard Hopkins Hanover Deeds 1815-1825 not including some I already knew about:

To Sarah Craig  4/376 – 4 acres from a Hickory Tree 🙂

To John Cooper 4/443 – near Patrick McGill’s white house

To Charity Fairbank 4/506 – next to John Fairbanks below

To John Fairbank 4/544- borders lot #17?

To Abram Lewis 4/593 – 5 acres, lot#2

To Richard A. Shipley – 4/612 near a plat norwood’s ferry marked #33 on Elkridge Plat and sold to Norwood – also borders 37 and 26

To George Pocock 5/223…

To Jeremiah McGillion 5/238 …  adjacent to Abram Lewis on the turnpike

To William Phillip 6/148 borders sarah craig and james hill

To Norwood – doesn’t say Richard but does say Hanover 6/224 – Norwoods Ferry, sold originally by the Hammonds – this is one of those cases where Hannah did not inherit this lot.

To Henry Drew – 6/512 some lot from a planted stone to the turnpike??

To William Denty – 7/257 South of Pocock’s Lot – 5/8th of an acre – roughly the Hobbs House

To Elaphalel Parsons 8/590 & 591 – 1 acre along the turnpike, and 591 talked about spring privileges. This is adjacent to the 2 acres that includes the Brumbaugh Property, see deed 10/349.

Good luck! I’m done with this exercise. It hurts my head.

Scenario 3 is a little less of a headache.

Scenario 3: Your person or corporation was buying or selling land in 1965 or later. 

Example. Benjamin Brumbaugh

Interesting, it doesn’t show when the Elkridge Heritage Society bought it from his estate. And when I tried searching on Elkridge Heritage Society I got no hits. I don’t know why that is. At least SDAT comes through for the current deed. 

When I check my own name it has all my land transactions including my current home.

Anyway, you get a link straight to the deeds so you can look at them. Nice!

There you have it. It is not the most fun activity to look at Land Records, but you sure can learn a lot of history!