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This week, Barbara Jensen will be doing a program at the Library Center at 9:30 am on research in Pennsylvania. The following are some links to help you be able to navigate to Internet Pennsylvania state-level sources.
General information about holdings of the Pennsylvania Archives with tips for genealogists can be found HERE.
Military
ARIAS provides access to card files which were created to index military records for soldiers in Pennsylvania. Wars covered are Revolutionary, Civil War, Spanish American, World War I, and militia for the Revolutionary War as well as other conflicts such as the Whiskey Rebellion and those against the Indians.
Although there are other military records available from the Pennsylvania State Archives, the website has in index of the Revolutionary War Pension files: Pensioner Index, A-K and Pensioner Index L-Z. After finding the person of interest, you can request that copies of the files be sent to you. Pension files from Pennsylvania do not contain the level of genealogical detail that pension files from the federal government's National Archives do. One pension file I've sent for told how old the soldier was and in what battle he was injured. Since early pension records from the federal government have been lost through fire, this may be the only way of proving that your ancestor fought in the Revolutionary War.
Land
Particularly useful to genealogists are the land records available at the Archives website.
This link takes you to the web page which describes the early land acquisition process in Pennsylvania and provides links to the online documents available for download. The process was intiated with the submission of an application to obtain a warrant. A warrant would be issued by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania which would give permission to have the land surveyed. After the survey was completed, the person obtaining the warrant could also get the land patent or he could sell the rights to others to obtain the land patent. Once there was a patentee, all further transactions concerning that parcel of land would go through the county office responsible for registering deeds.
So how is this useful for you? Your ancestor may have been one of those warrantees or patentees, and the files may enable you to fix his location at a given time and place. Or you may want to determine exactly where the land described in a deed lay to determine proximity to other people possibly related. You can first search the warrant register index and then also the patent register index to see if he did obtain a warrant or patent. This may also help you find where your ancestor was before he moved on to the area in which you already know he was. If your goal is to determine the original land description for which you have a later deed, you will move backwards through the chain of ownership. Often the county deeds will state who previous owners were and the earliest ones will tell who the patentee was. Once you have that information, you can look in the patent register index and find your man which will then tell you who the warrantee was. Finding that man in the warrant register index will give you the location of the map in the survey books. The maps not only give the land description, but also tell who held the warrants for the surrounding land.
Keep in mind that you may find the warrant information with survey map location in the mother country from which your county came. Also, rather than sticking with the known county locations be sure to check out the west side and east side (of the Susquehanna River) applications which cover a broader territory encompassing several counties.
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OGS Conference