- Eras
- Early American eraStrang eraIrish era
- Concepts
- land-surveyhistoriographymigrationheritage
- Within
- Beaver Island archipelago
Summary
This archive now holds a scoped BLM GLO tract-book page layer for the Beaver Island survey footprint: 126 page-index records, of which 80 public page-image PDFs are locally retained with checksums and 46 are retained as metadata-only records because the public search response exposes no image URL. The scope includes the immediate Beaver group and Fox Islands: Michigan Meridian 19, T34–35N R13W and T37–40N R8–12W.
Tract books can preserve entry, cancellation, relinquishment, and administrative history that a final patent may omit. This collection makes the pages available for evidence-led review; it is not yet a transcription or a person/parcel history.
The 80 retained image PDFs also have a page-addressable embedded-text discovery index. It makes name and legal-description leads findable, but does not elevate the imperfect text layer into evidence.
Evidence and limits
The BLM search locations are page-index metadata. They identify a page as relevant to one or more township/range/section combinations, but do not establish that every handwritten entry on the page concerns those sections. The retained PDFs are image records with rough embedded text that is useful for discovery but not sufficiently reliable for a claim without visual page verification.
Neither an entry name nor a legal-description row alone establishes a person’s identity, residence, tribal affiliation, ownership duration, a complete chain of title, or current ownership. The 46 no-image records are kept visible so that the collection is not misrepresented as complete image coverage.
See also
Sources
- The public API returned 328 Charlevoix and 284 Leelanau Tractbook search hits. Filtering the page-level search index to Michigan Meridian 19 and the project township/range footprint retained 126 unique page records. Eighty pages had public image-PDF URLs and were retrieved with provenance sidecars; 46 retained page records exposed no public image URL and remain metadata-only acquisition gaps. The holder's public portal is searchable but does not link this record directly; the archive holds a copy of the file and can provide it on request.federal · glo_tractbooks · beaver_island_tractbook_pages
- Reproducible public-record tract-book collector.The collector follows the normal public browser token flow, searches both counties, preserves only page-level island-scope index locations, removes temporary tokens from saved metadata, and records unavailable image URLs explicitly. It does not OCR, transcribe, identify individuals, or infer title continuity. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.scripts · retrieve_glo_tractbooks
- Project embedded-text discovery index for held BLM tract-book pages.The reproducible index extracts the embedded text layer from all 80 held image PDFs and preserves page identifiers, page-index locations, and a claim limit. The handwriting-derived text is unverified discovery material, not a transcription or claim source. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.federal · glo_tractbooks · page_text_discovery_index
Added 2 August 2026. Recent changes
Cite this article
Beaver Island Archive, “BLM GLO tract-book pages for the Beaver Island survey footprint”, https://beaverislandarchive.org/documents/glo-tractbook-page-collection/, accessed [date], citing Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records public search system, Tractbook category; retrieved 2026-08-02. (and 2 further sources listed on the page).
Last revised 2026-08-02. Fill in [date] with the date you read it — this page is static and cannot know that.
BibTeX for “BLM GLO tract-book pages for the Beaver Island survey footprint”RIS for “BLM GLO tract-book pages for the Beaver Island survey footprint”