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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.