I've been working for awhile on a roughly 150 square mile area of South Texas that for various reasons has some considerable confusion in the original metes and bounds land grants made according to surveys run between 1840 and 1909. One of the grants, a survey originally made for the State in 1875, sold as School Land, and eventually patented about forty years later, had six sets of corrected field notes filed in the GLO over that period, each significantly different.
While working sketches are useful, in wildly confused areas, they often really aren't beyond demonstrating that things are a mess and don't really fit together that well. What I find more helpful is a chronology of every survey-related event reflected in the files of the GLO from field notes that were later canceled by corrected field notes, to connecting lines filed, to applications to purchase School Land, both surveyed and unsurveyed, including rejected applications. What you end up with is a fairly good image of what each surveyor at every point in time might have had knowledge of and, in the case of the applications to purchase School Land, what might have precipitated some flurry of surveying.
If the time is available, preparing a summary of each surveyor's work at every point in the chronology is surprisingly illuminating, since you are interpreting what he did in light of what had previously been done that he would have had the means of knowledge of, particularly his own work in the vicinity. It's something that can get recycled into the final report, too.
