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Gen 302 Platting (Drawing) Deeds

If a legal description is complete and accurate, you can draw it out on a piece of paper. That drawing is called a plat.

Here is a quick geometry lesson. By convention, north typically points to the top of a piece of paper; and south to the bottom of a piece of paper, etc. To plot S17E,

1.         Mark your point of beginning with a pencil point.

2.         You take a protractor available from any good office supply store and align the center of the straight side on your starting point, aimed upside down with the 90 mark on the protractor aimed directly at the bottom of the paper.

3.         Count off 17 degrees on the protractor going counterclockwise (toward the east, i.e. right side of the paper). Make a mark at the 17 point.

4.         Draw a faint line from your beginning point through the 17 mark.

5.         (The best ruler is a triangular shaped ruler with an engineers scale, i.e marked in 1/tenths of an inch not 1/eights of an inch.)

6.         Pick a scale on the ruler where it looks like the measurements will fit. Mark off the distance of 18 along the faint line and make a point. Darken the line from the point of beginning to the 18 mark. (Normally you would erase the rest of the faint line, but in this case the line continues in the same direction). Measure out an additional 94, mark that point and darken that section of line. Now erase the rest of the line.

Each time you darken a line to the ending point, that point becomes the beginning point for the next line. Repeat 1 thru 6 for each line. (To draw the S70W line, align the center of the straight side on your new starting point, aimed upside down with the 90 mark on the protractor aimed directly at the bottom of the paper and count off 70 degrees on the protractor going clockwise (toward the west, i.e. left side of the paper).

Repeat the process until you finish the N8E 56 line and then draw a straight line from the ending point of that line to the original point of beginning.

This process is very tedious if you do it manually. There is a great software program that lets you draw plats and print them from your home computer. DeedMapper is sold by Direct Line Software (http://www.directlinesoftware.com/). It is a great little program. It has a slightly frustrating learning curve, but once you get familiar with it, you will zoom along. Customer service is really good.

Better yet, Direct Line sponsors a Deed Data Pool where users have contributed plats they have drawn. To make that even better, some of the original land grants for entire counties in Virginia have been platted.

Here is an example of a section from a file in the Deed Data Pool. You will note some double lines and overlaps, because of deed and surveying inaccuracies, but you can still get a good picture of how adjacent plats fit together.

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