To search by Location:
As noted above, there is no consistent format for Briefs of Title. While this makes it difficult to find owners’ names, it makes it impossible to specifically describe the land covered by each brief. In some briefs, the land is hardly described at all, having titles such as “Four lots of ground in the City of Philadelphia,” with any more specific definition absent or buried so deeply that it was not practical to search for it. Since no consistent description was possible, street names—as many as possible—have been included in the Location field to describe the approximate location of the land covered by the deed.
In order to search by location, you should go to the page displaying the complete index, ordered by name, and press “Ctrl-F” or the equivalent text-searching command in your browser software, and search for the street on which your property lies, examining each matching entry to see if the other streets listed fit the location sought. Additionally, searches could be conducted for other neighboring streets.
Some lots are known by a name rather than an address, for instance "Bush Hill Estate" or "Emlenton." This is a carry-over from the days of large farms and country estates. The location of these lands may have been common knowledge to a Philadelphian of the day, so they are rarely described in great detail. Therefore, it is worth searching for the last name of a likely owner in the “Location” field as well, as sometimes the name of the estate includes that of the owner as well, for example “Kenderton Lots.” At the time of the compiling of this index, there may not have been sufficient indication that “Kenderton” was also the name of a previous owner, and therefore the name would not have been entered in “Owner” as well.
Since browsers are only capable of conducting precise text-string searches with this function, you should keep your query general. For example, search for only “Susquehanna” not “Susquehanna Avenue and Fifteenth street” and then look through those entries for the one that contains Fifteenth Street as well. Also, you should be sure to try variations: search for both “Fifteenth” and “15th" if you are looking for a property on Fifteenth street, since this index represents the work of at least two individuals.
Back to top
About the Township/Neighborhood:
The City of Philadelphia once encompassed only what is now generally referred to as “Center City,” while the outlying areas of Philadelphia County were divided in many small Townships or Boroughs. Most of these areas have retained, with some modifications and more-or-less unofficially, their names as neighborhoods. Where included in Briefs, these names are included without descriptors, such as “Township” and Borough.”
Although nearly all of these Briefs are technically located in the “City of Philadelphia” today, some were also in what was originally defined as the “City” as separate from and inside the “County of Philadelphia” (today, the two are coterminous). These are simply denoted “City” where it is explicit that the area referred to is the pre-incorporation (original) city, bounded by Spring Garden and South Streets, between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers.
Back to top
Ward and Street Changes:
All entries in the index appear as they were printed in the published Brief. This means that nothing has been converted to modern standards. This has two particularly important effects that researchers should be aware of:
Street names have changed repeatedly over the course of Philadelphia’s history. For instance, Vine Street was called “Sassafras” until the mid-nineteenth century. If a Brief lists the property as being located on “Sassafras” street, then that is the street listed in the location column. If a street has changed its name since the 1830’s, which represents the beginning point for this index, one should search for each subsequent name.
Like streets, wards have changed several times. Click here for a page offered by the City of Philadelphia on these changes. As in the case of streets, the ward listed on the Brief is that which was printed, not the current ward.
Back to top
The Column "JM Data":
This index represents a combination of two indexes, one of which contained significantly more fields of information about the Briefs of Title it indexed. In order to make full use of this information, for these records it has been included in a field called “JM Data,” as the more detailed index was compiled by Mr. Jefferson Moak. In this field, formerly separate field are concatenated together, and these, along with their original headings, are separated by sets of four hyphens.
Back to top