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P.T. Barnum inherited five acres of Connecticut land as a boy and was told he owned one of the state’s most valuable farms. He eventually discovered it was a swamp, but years later the same property helped him finance his American Museum in New York.

The Maxwell Land Grant once covered about 2.7 million acres across what is now New Mexico and Colorado. After gold brought prospectors onto the property, Lucien Maxwell eventually sold most of the grant, leaving the new owners to face a growing dispute with settlers that became known as the Colfax County War.

California’s transition from Mexican to U.S. rule created a complicated process for determining who legally owned existing land grants. One of the strangest claims came from José Limantour, who said he owned Alcatraz Island.

Lovely County existed for barely a year before a new boundary erased it from the map. More than a century later, some of its long-lost records turned up scattered near a dump in Oklahoma.

A Spanish land grant in what is now Arizona dates back to 1789, when the United States did not yet control the territory. The records surrounding that grant show just how far a property’s history can reach and how old documents can remain relevant generations later.

The Homestead Act may seem like a piece of 19th-century history, but homesteading continued in Alaska into the 1980s. The story of Kenneth W. Deardorff, America’s last homesteader, shows how federal land records can preserve the beginnings of a property’s title history.

Property records do more than document ownership. In Baldwin County, Alabama, the fight over the county seat ultimately came down to possession of the courthouse records themselves. The story is an unusual reminder of why deeds, plats, land records, and other recorded documents preserve far more than individual transactions.