Land and Deed Records Transcription
Leo transcribes deed books, grantor/grantee indexes, and land patents as they are actually written, and turns them into searchable, well-indexed records you can stand behind.
6 articles
Leo Team · 17 September 2026
Land Patent Records: Tracing the First Private Owner of a Piece of Land
Land patent records and the land-entry case files behind them: locating the first private owner in federal or state archives and reading both without trusting names or machine transcriptions.
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Leo Team · 18 August 2026
How to Search a Grantor-Grantee Index: The Two-Direction Method, and What to Do When the Handwriting Fights Back
How to search a grantor-grantee index with the two-direction method, build name variants that survive clerk spellings, and read dense handwritten index pages when digital coverage ends.
Leo Team · 18 August 2026
How to Read Old Deeds: Clause Order, Deed Hands, and the Boilerplate That Tells You Where You Are
How to read old deeds by placing yourself in the standard Anglo-American clause order and boilerplate formulas, including description units, colonial and civil-law exceptions, and verification discipline.
Leo Team · 6 August 2026
Digitizing County Deed Books: A Working Plan for Recorder Offices with Fragile Volumes and No Index
Working plan for digitizing fragile, unindexed county deed books: triage and overhead capture standards, rebuilding grantor–grantee indexes, and what reads nineteenth-century clerks’ hands.
Leo Team · 6 August 2026
Where Title Search Errors Come From: Misread Names, Missed Liens, and Miscopied Bearings
Where title search errors come from—misread index names, misindexed instruments, missed or over-read marginal releases, lien-docket gaps, and miscopied bearings—and how to verify each against the original image.
Leo Team · 22 July 2026
Deed Transcription: A Working Guide to Reading Historical Deed Records
Deed transcription covers how to read the structure, paleography, and legal formulae of historical deed records, and compares OCR, LLM, and specialist HTR tools for accuracy risks in chain-of-title work.