A history of your land

The history beneath your feet

Old government maps, aerial photos, laser scans and the county deed books, traced for one piece of ground. Who owned it, what it looked like in 1935, what changed, and what is still written in the dirt.

Reserve your reportWatch a real property change

One real property, 260 acres near Woodruff, South Carolina

Same ground, since 1935.

Scroll, and the property line holds still while the land changes underneath it. Every image is the original federal survey of that year, laid on the same coordinates.

The property on the 1935 USGS map The property on the 1957 USGS map The property on the 1983 USGS map Bare earth lidar of the property Tree height lidar of the property
1935USGS Greer map

1935 The first map

Open upland between a creek and a railroad.

The line built in 1885 wraps the west and north sides like the letter r. Ferguson Creek crosses the middle. No ponds yet.

1957 Something new

A chain of ponds appears.

Three small ponds now step down the hollow on the north end. No deed mentions them. The map does.

1983 A closer survey

The creek bottom turns to marsh.

Blue marsh symbols spread along the bottom, and a straight dashed line, likely a power line, cuts across the middle.

2019 Laser survey

Strip away every tree.

A plane fired laser pulses at the ground. With the woods removed, old farm terraces still ring the hills, almost invisible on foot.

2019 Tree heights

The tallest tree: about 123 feet.

The same scan measured every treetop. The tallest stands in the creek bottom, about as tall as a 12-story building.

Drag the handle

See the shape of the land under the woods.

Left is the canopy the laser saw. Right is the bare ground beneath it: the railroad grade, gullies feeding the creek, and terraces from the cotton years.

Tree height map Bare earth map
TreesBare earth

The ground beneath

Every soil on the place, with its full scientific name.

Eleven soils from the USDA survey, grouped by how much topsoil they still hold. The long names read like a pedigree: tap a word to see what it records.

Gentle upland, little erosion

Fine, kaolinitic, thermic Typic Kanhapludults

Cecil sandy loam; Hard Labor sandy loam (Oxyaquic Kanhapludults)

68.6acres

Upland, moderately eroded

Fine, kaolinitic, thermic Typic Kanhapludults

Cecil sandy clay loam; Pacolet sandy clay loam; Cecil-Bethlehem complex

114.3acres

Upland, severely eroded

Fine, kaolinitic, thermic Typic Kanhapludults

Cecil clay loam, red subsoil at the surface

19.0acres

Creek bottom, floods often

Fine-loamy, mixed, active, thermic Fluvaquentic Dystrudepts

Chewacla loam; Toccoa fine sandy loam (Typic Udifluvents)

53.1acres

Fine. Clay-rich: 35 to 60 percent clay in the subsoil.

The same 260 acres, by the numbers

Facts that make people stop and stare.

0Million gallons

Of water fall on it in a one-inch rain.

0Feet

The tallest tree, measured by laser.

0Football fields

Would fit inside the property lines.

0Years

Since the oldest survey in the record, 1895.

What is in a Land Pedigree

Your land, read from every record that remembers it.

  • Old maps

    Every federal survey since the 1930s

    Your boundary laid on each one, so you can watch ponds, roads, woods and homesites come and go.

  • From the air

    Aerial photos, year by year

    When the house went up, when the field was planted, when the pond filled.

  • Laser scans

    The bare ground and the tallest tree

    Terraces, old roadbeds and gullies hidden under the woods, plus the height of the canopy.

  • The owners

    The chain of title, as far back as it goes

    Each owner with the deed book and page, walked back toward the first land grant.

  • The ground

    Soils, water and the story they tell

    What the land is made of, how hard it was farmed, and where the water runs.

A real report

Forty acres we had never seen.

To put the method to the test, we picked a parcel at random off a county map in Arkansas and wrote its history: the 1861 federal patent that first sold it, three government surveys, thirteen years of aerial photos and two laser scans. It turned up a house that vanished, a buried pipeline and farm terraces hidden in the grass. The owners and the exact location are left out of this copy; your report includes them.

Report cover, The Lee FortyThe cover Discoveries pageWhat the maps reveal 1993 map plateMap plates Tree height pageLaser survey
Open the full samplePDF, 20 pages

How it works

Three steps, and we do the digging.

  1. Tell us the landAn address or a county parcel number is enough.
  2. We do the diggingDeed books traced owner by owner, old survey sheets fitted to modern coordinates, laser scans processed point by point, and every finding checked against its source.
  3. You get the historyA finished report, with a framed-print keepsake option.

First orders open soon

Reserve a history of your land.

Leave your email and we will write when orders open. People on this list get the first spots.

One email when orders open, then only if you want more. Your email is never sold or shared. Privacy

Anywhere in the U.S.Federal maps, aerial photos, lidar and soils cover nearly the whole country.
A history, not a title searchFor a sale or purchase, use a title attorney.
Every fact citedEach one tied to the record it came from.