Genealogists are well aware that just because something is old, it's still useful, even if it's an old Plat Book. The Missouri Digital Heritage Collection, part of the Missouri State Archives and Missouri State Library online databases under the Missouri Secretary of State's Office, has many digitized publications ready to reveal secrets and insights into the lives of past Missourians and their communities.
Today I want to draw attention to the 1930 Butler County, Missouri Plat Book available online. This is a great resource to see who owned land and where at. If you have land descriptions from deed records of relatives, this will be a great help in visualizing where that they were located. The library owns various copies of Plat Maps from the 1970's through the present day. These could be useful in determining how land was divided up or what areas have stayed in the same family for generations. Using features on an old Plat Map, such as waterways or railroads, could be helpful in finding a location on a more familiar county road map to visit an old homestead.
Being aware of how items are described in one online library catalog, can translate into successful searching of the catalogs of other libraries. (Caveat: This is dependent on the library using standardized cataloging techniques though! Akin to genealogists properly citing their sources.) This item has the following subject headings:
- Butler County (Mo.) - Maps
- Real Property - Missouri - Butler County - Maps
- Landowners - Missouri - Butler County - Maps
Using these terms, along with changing the state and county names as needed, will help you quickly locate potentially useful items in other libraries for various locations.
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