Ebenezer Perry Carlisle Webster's Land Patent

Judy Russell, The Legal Genealogist, recently published a blog post titled Thank you, BLM!. Her blog post got me thinking about when I searched for the land record of my great-grandfather Watson (Frederick) Emory Webster, a.k.a. "The Traveling Dentist" here on my blog. I had found that he purchased land in Rooks County, Kansas in 1894. I'll share more about that in a future post.

While searching the Bureau of Land Management website again yesterday, I was delighted to find the land patent of my 2nd great-grandfather, Ebenezer Perry Carlisle Webster, who was Watson's father.¹

Ebenezer was born in Racine, Meigs, Ohio on 11 August 1838. He served in the US Civil War in Company E, 74th Regiment, Illinois Infantry. According to census records, Ebenezer and his family moved to Kansas sometime before 1880. In the 1880 US census he and his family were living in Otoe Reservation, Marshall, Kansas.² By March of 1885 he and his family were living in Marysville, Marshall, Kansas.³

Ebenezer's land patent was issued on 30 June 1884 and consisted of 160 acres. Here's a zoomed in view of Ebenezer's land.

The boundaries for Ebenezer's land were Arrowhead Road, 5th Road, 6th Road and Bison Road. I was curious to see what that area in Kansas looks like today so I turned to Google Maps. Here's what I found.

Ebenezer's land is inside the red square. Indian Creek ran through his land and there was a pond or small lake as well. There isn't a name for this body of water on the Google Maps website.

Here's what the land looks like when I turned on the "Earth" feature on Google Maps.

It looks like there are two homes within this piece of property. I wonder who owns the land now.

The map of Ebenezer's property isn't the only thing I found. See the tab at the top of the BLM website that says "Patent Image?" I clicked on that and found the Land Patent document, which as you can see, can be downloaded as a PDF file. Of course, I did download the document.

If you'd like to search for Land Patents on the BLM website, click HERE. And to learn more about Land Patent Searches on the FamilySearch Wiki, click HERE.

Thanks for reading!

Jana

 

© 2015 Copyright by Jana Last, All Rights Reserved

---

1 Bureau of Land Management, "Land Patent Search," database, General Land Office Records (www.glorecords.blm.gov/search/default.aspx : accessed 15 June 2015) entry for Ebenezer Perry Carlisle Webster, Marshall County, Kansas, no. 718. ^↩

2 "United States Census, 1880," database, FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org : accessed 16 June 2015), entry for E P Webster, District 163, page 3, Otoe Reservation, Marshall, Kansas; citing "NARA microfilm publication T9. ^↩

3 "1885 Kansas Territory Census," database with images, Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com : accessed 15 June 2015), entry for E P C Webster (b. 1839), Marysville, Marshall, Kansas, Page 20, Line 8, Roll: KS1885_86.^↩