Looking for ideas and best practices on how to present or visualize a complicated chain of title to landowners.
Is there a way (Carlson Intellicad shop here) to almost animate to show the changes/transfers over time?
Parcels have been subdivided and recombined over multiple generations starting in the early 1800s, including a court house steps distress sale to a lumber company and a repurchase from the lumber company by a later generation of the same family. Small pieces have been sold off. No actual legal descriptions with numbers (metes and bounds state) since the 1880s, subsequent deeds and wills refer back to previous deeds. Mostly very rural woods and almost mountainous terrain, at least for the East Coast.
I’m working with my boss on this complicated chain of title. He’s the license, I’m the courthouse researcher and field guy. He did all the hard thinking, and he plotted up all the deeds I found and documented the chain with references.
For various reasons I’ll probably end up explaining it to the landowner. Flipping through CAD layers on a screen isn’t going to work. Looking at stacks of greyish scans of 1850 cursive deeds isn’t going to work either. I almost want to print our CAD plots out on mylar every time there was a title transfer and overlay them chronologically. But that’s so 1990 🙂
I’m thinking of perhaps pasting CAD plots into Powerpoint?
I look forward to seeing the solution to this situation.
Sadly, the client usually doesn't care about a history lesson. Even though it is critical to finding the ultimate answer to "What do I own?"
Power Point seems to be the best solution or just a simple slide show.
I had a way of showing that for some of the airports in AK, I used a different layout tab for each transaction, and was careful about my layering and color coded the different types of ownership. Printed them on legal sized paper with border and title block stating the transaction data.
These were meant for in-house use, but could have been given to a client.
If I were still in AK I would post a couple samples.
What you describe is a perfect solution for GIS. Once you use cad and comp everything you could simply attribute the takes and gives several different ways. And multiple at any moment. For instance the DB and PG. date files or recorded date survey was done. Then make a simple oh I can’t think of the tech name but a time lapse fairly easy. So easy just a viewer and slide bare type thing could be visualized by the end user is just one way. Maybe @jitterboogie could elaborate a little more about possible free ware. I did a lot of this not so much plats or deeds but same concept when in the USMC many years ago. So we combined vector data(points Lines Polygons) and Raster data(pictures imagery ). And just added the correct attributes to things in far away places. Gave commanders a quick accurate visual of what has been confirmed gone or might be gone from anything you can imagine buildings power materials one would drive or land on vegetation above and below ground. So that might be an alternative to take your days out as a shape file add the pertinent deed info and calls metes bounds to correct lines etc. dates etc.
Accurate in the meaning of the information not always a position. Thought I might need to clarify that in a GIS get it surveyed type setting. But my gut sais that would be a useful tool to use GIS for by surveyors also maybe in daily work practice just to do chain of title in an interactive way. But I am still learning.
I worked in the GIS arena in the infancy of ESRI software when I was newly licensed. I spent over a year calculating the location of every lot, road, easement and other information to generate a GIS for a large township that included tagged attached data relating to all public utilities, roadways and the like. The entire town was built by Levitt, who was the pioneer of prefab construction. He built several towns on the east coast, in PA, NJ, NY and FLA. His filed plans for every section of town were very tight and monumented very nicely.
The problem is, when shape files and aerial images are overlaid, rubber sheeting is inevitable, even when everything is in the same datum because to the large area involved. GIS is a great visual reference and source of information but is, by no means, completely reliable.
Rubber sheeting is what is happening for sure. But that’s because of lack of knowledge. Imagery can only be so accurate and so precise. One doesn’t have to move the highly accurate and very precise information to imagery. That’s a lack of understanding. One can’t move the imagery to the the surveyed data. Now I have done it both ways yes rubber sheeting because that’s what was needed for the end use. It’s a visual tool. Or a glorified power point slide an exhibit. I have also done it the other way where imagery moves to my geodetic positions. As geodetic control contrary to all the power points that exist from ESRI or any other basic GIS course. The geodetic control is the true basis of any imagery orthographic image or whatever. You can actually rubber sheet for an exhibit like we see with many County GIS systems but if they did it correctly and the Land Surveyors did as well. ( Not publishing a state plane coordinate that has been scaled ) one could simply extract the exact location within the uncertainty of previous surveyors measurements technique and have that let’s say Audi absolute truth to whatever datum and the precision of how well they did the survey minus any disturbances or whatever. As we all know no measurements we do are completely the best they can be. But my comment above was for a visual simple showing all deeds relative to each other and whatever vacates or acquisitions have taken place over time. No different than keying in a metes bounds for lot 1 and then again same lot 20 years later new description. Then lot 2 comes in and we try and best fit to lot 1 but one side is longer by whatever distance. In no way am I implying GIS software or processes are gospel. Just another tool that could be used to aid us. Instead of rejecting it flat out as many of us in this side of geomatics has done. I have walked into rooms where the simple stating GIS is like a criminal offense. The software much like cad or anything else is oblast good as it’s user. I would feel just as comfortable platting from GIS software as cad. I can make all the geometry just as good as cad .
Years ago (when I was a lowly survey tech), I did this just as a series of 8.5x11 exhibits on a 30x42 sheet arranged as a flow chart. It was for an adverse possession case to show where a 4-acre triangular parcel got dropped from the chain of title in the 1920's when one corner was accidentally omitted from the parcel description.
Carlson iCAD user here. I like the idea of multiple layout tabs, freezing and thawing appropriate layers in viewport in successive tabs. Use this method often to show different views of same site, same overall boundary. You could then export to slideshow if you wanted.
This would make a really cool ArcGIS StoryMaps Project!
You could use QGIS in the free arena, it's every bit as good as the ESRI suite if you're going to learn it.
And depending on which county and state etc.etc.etc. you'll find the ones using the Local government model set up with parcel fabric will swear up and down there's not a single sliver or anything else off....until you actually look at the deeds. The tools in GIS are to make it look great for the CDO princes and princesses and try to fix the differences in BOB and methods of measuring. That's a lost cause, because the monuments hold, then ...then...
Carry on
I'm just a biologist anyway.
"... will swear up and down there’s not a single sliver or anything else off…"
I usually find that true on the ground where I put away the calculator and follow the evidence...
This is a slam dunk for an ESRI story map process, i retract my QGIS mention because i was sleep deprived and didnt fully understand the scope. Power point is the worst thing in communication since that thing Fred Flintstone used to hammer out his ideas on back in the day.... 😉 Seriously though, this is where Survey and GIS can make some great connections. Judt keep it out of the Planners hands, unless they actually have a license to survey, because i blame planners now for anything geospatially screwed up in the government appropriated power theyve been granted, without the dependent knowledge base they need.😎
indeed, i was flying internationally and didnt mean to redundantly repost your obvious response. ^5 woohoo to story maps!
