How do you walk someone through your boundary reasoning?

That's one heck of a question. I''m not sure I could answer completely in under 5000 words.  You see, my situation over the decades was over 90 percent single tract surveys for private individuals or someone involved directly in the need for the survey.  Repetition was rare.  It happened, of course.  Most of the time, though, a new job was a new adventure.  I might have five jobs for the same individual with every one of them having no connection to another.  There were cases where the client paying us was a bank or another category of lender, a real estate firm, a title insurance company or a city or a county or a federal agency, but, every job was in no way connected to any of the others.  There were many cases where surveying within a specific city block multiple times was little easier the second or third time around for all sorts of reasons.  Boundary detemination is far more than math. My general area of service in PLSSia was divided into two different sets of instructions to the original Government contractors laying out the sections.  In many specific locales you must know certain details in order to follow the  precedents set long before you arrived.  Otherwise, you are that fool from Timbuktu who firmly believes one size hammer fits all applications.  I have honestly found situations, where when I showed up to work on job #2 fifteen years later, I realized I had not done the best job the first time there.

we generally start with the title commitment or legal description and then work backwards, obtain copies of the adjoining parcels.  Maybe call to have the utilities marked, then send field crew to field locate monumentation, improvements, adjacent roadways, and offsite adjacent monumentation as necessary.  If no boundary issues, no overlaps, no gores and the record description provided us for the survey closely matches what we find in the field, we do not need to go further.

However, if the boundary does not match and there are issues, we research previous recorded deeds on both subject and adjoiner properties to determine junior and senior rights.  Just finishing a project with the legal description furnished overlapped causing a 'boundary line conflict'.  We had to go back to 1880 deeds/descriptions to resolve the conflict.  We input each of the descriptions (many did not close) into iPOGO, exported to dxf and referenced in Microstation.  We also referenced raster data to include aerial photos and older surveys.

our 2026 survey incorporates more precise measurements but in the end, it is the called for monumentation that helps resolve boundaries.

Vance, if we could take a picture or scan the old deeds, many which are cursive or barely readable, some which are in chains or poles or varas, and your software could parse the legal description, plot same and compare with field and other record data, that would be a start. 

glad to see someone building new tools

@holy-cow think you might've misunderstood the premise here. Nothing to do Maybe my fault for not posting a better GIF instead of this sample data. The surveyor who asked for this was tracing through historical records of one parcel back to line origination through its history, and was trying to explain his boundary determination based on the various historical evidence he was weighing, and getting a visual for chain of title etc.

@hpalmer A bit ago we had someone send us an original land grant from King George III, which we thought was pretty cool (back when he was king of king of Great Britain, France and Ireland! Or at least, liked to think he was... He dropped France from his title in 1801).

(Note: with any text that's getting read, we always try to be upfront with how good the output is and how much to trust it, so we have a confidence score. This one reads at 75%, which is fairly low - clean docs are 96-98% usually.)

Also, we do natively handle chains, links, varas (TX/CA for now), perches, and rods. Happy to add any others if any requests. And we always show the original units so that you can go and make any edits as needed.

 Q. How many psychiatrists does it take to screw in a light bulb? A. Only one, but that light bulb has to really want to change. 

Boundaries tend to be a very emotional issue for a client. Explaining them takes a lot more than facts and figures. 

@norman-oklahoma I'm 100% stealing that joke. And yes makes absolutely makes sense on the emotional side, too