This is the surveyor’s certificate from an early 1990s plat I ran across today.
That is a typical mess all thrown together to fit something where there is not enough room.
Or as Eastwood said, a cluster&%#!
I wonder if the (WHEW!) was left in by mistake. I could see someone, maybe a tech or secretary that retyped the description, putting it there as a joke, then nobody catching it, and inserting it into the drawing.
he did not even bother to arrange the entries into a table/comumn so that you could cut/copy/paste in the future for use in other softwares.
The property described..
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That is what OCR scanning software is for. You can digitize the text by scanning and then reformat the description for legibility.
I had a centerline description to check a few weeks ago that would have required plugging in about 120 courses by hand. It was easier to scan the description and extract the bearing and distance calls to run the calculation.
> I wonder if the (WHEW!) was left in by mistake. I could see someone, maybe a tech or secretary that retyped the description, putting it there as a joke, then nobody catching it, and inserting it into the drawing.
Isn't that the main job for techs? My favorite was putting a picture of a seal in place of the engineers seal; all he did was put a red x through it, not even a chuckle!
It looks like the surveyor gave the title company a Word document and they decided to save space and re-format it for their convenience. I'm sure it was several pages long as the surveyor originally formatted it, but hey, why worry about reading that pesky description? Let's reduce it to two pages.
It's that title company mentality. They make sure their paperwork is squared away and legible, but the survey description is the last item to be put in the title commitment, and they don't really care whether anyone can read it.
Your OCR is better than my OCR. Mine really struggles with DMS symbols.
Steve
If I read it correctly, it has a single tie to a section corner but no basis of bearings and no calls for adjoiners, so unless you stumble across his POB monument the parcel cannot be surveyed.
Notary?
It looks like there is a notary under the surveyors signature.
Why would that be required?
It can be surveyed (staked) but I'm with you that it probably can't be retraced, at least not from the info in the document.
The only difference from this and most of the metes without bounds descriptions I see is the length. Makes you wonder if calls to markers or adjoiners were left out to keep the description small or if no markers were set. Of course with enough research and work one probably could figure out from extrinsic evidence the boundaries. There may be markers out there. Which lines are new lines and which where intended to be along an adjoiner. Unless its a new island in the middle of a large parcel then there must be some lines with adjoiners. I still see this kind of stuff on new subdivision plats (metes without bounds). A basis of bearing statement is usually there as our law requires it.
Mike stated that this is a legal from a plat, so the monuments, basis of bearings, adjoiner info, ect. are shown on the drawing. Hopefully.
Notary?
There was title company and group of lawyers in a neighboring county to here that for a period of time would not accept any surveyor's documents without being notarized.
Some surveyors still practice that habit as if their own signature and seal are not sufficient.
Not only that, it misclosed by 0.9'.
Notary?
The purpose of a Notary is to witness a signature to assure that the person whose name is there is actually the person that signed. Not a bad practice given the horror stories you hear about people using a dead surveyor's stamp, etc.
Generally I find that I need a notary when my plat is being recorded "stand alone" rather than being attached to a deed.
Not surprised. There are a lot of non-tangent curves in there using the chord bearing and distance to define them. Those rounding errors add up after a while. That is why I always use a radial bearing to define (orient) a non-tangent curve. Rounding of arc seconds introduces significantly less rounding error than rounding distances to the nearest hundreth and the radius is almost always an even number (i.e. 200.00')exactly and the delta is also to the nearest arc second.
Also lots of places in that description for fat fingered errors.
Andy
All subdivision plats in the county require not only the surveyor's signature and seal, but a notary also.
Those are the only signatures of mine that are notarized, but all are required.
Notary?
Then how do we know the notary is the real notary that signed.
They give us a seal and authorize us to sign surveys. Isn't that as offical as a notary's seal and signature.
Just something we've been through a number of times with the local government types; when they think it over enough they usually see how silly it is.
The sad part is this could easily have been an attempt to simplify a pile of existing parcel descriptions that overlapped, had gaps, whatever......
Still a mess but the origins of it could easily have been messier still.