I've been spending evenings researching some family land. I started inputting nearby plans tonight. I input the plan, add some important details like abutters calls and monuments, then block it and place it over the GIS.
I started with one a few lots removed from locus. This one was performed by a very reputable firm who did sufficient research and published the ancient deed references for the abutting parcels.
I then added the plan adjacent to the first, still a few lots removed from locus, but it's the only way to tie the first into the system. Not by a great firm, but far enough away for me not to worry about.
I showed SWMBO (still pregnant BTW) and she saw that I had researched five plans for two lots adjacent to locus (3 for one and 2 for the other). "Why didn't you put those in first?" I guess I want to go the roundabout way to the get to the solution. I'm pretty sure I'd have to input those plans in the end...
What is worse is when you do all the field work to arrive at your conclusion and then discover monuments at all your corners. Especially if the client is following you around when you find the old monuments that you had no idea existed. Then he wants to know why you spent all your time going around Robin Hood's barn instead of merely finding the existing monuments.
For the literature-challenged: Robin Hood's house was Sherwood Forest; its roof the leaves and branches. His dinner was the king's deer; his wealth the purses of hapless travelers. What need had he of a barn, and how was it laid out if to go around it means, as the use of the phrase implies, a rambling roundabout course? The explanation is simple. He had no barn. His granary, when he had need of one, was the cornfields of the neighborhood. To go around his barn was to make a circuitous route around the neighborhood fields."
Fortunately (relatively speaking) these are old woodlots with poor descriptions. My family's deed calls for stones at each corner, no distances, one abutter is "The Cleared Land" two others are specified and the 4th is blank.