Availability: All plans.
Some courses do not describe a line. They point at one. “Along the meanders of the creek”, “with the east line of the Quillane tract”, “along the westerly right of way line of Foundry Line Road”, “the east line of the tract described in Deed Book 402, at page 17”. Every one of these names a boundary that lives in a source Trace has no access to, so Trace cannot build that course. This page covers all of them together, because they fail for one reason and are fixed the same way.
The example wording on this page was written by BoundaryLogic for these articles. The names, roads and recording references in it are invented and match no real place, person or record.
Why Trace cannot build these
Trace works from what the description says. A course that gives a direction and a distance carries its own geometry. A course that names a creek, a neighbour, a street or another document carries none: the shape is in the creek, in the neighbour’s deed, in the road plan, in the other instrument. Trace does not hold any of those and cannot fetch them, so there is nothing to build from.
This is not a reading failure that a better scan or another attempt would fix. The information is not in the document.
The five shapes
| How it reads | What it points at | What resolves it |
|---|---|---|
| Along the meanders of a creek, river, branch or shoreline | The watercourse itself. The feature is the boundary. | A survey that measured the meander. Its courses can be typed as a short run of ordinary courses. |
| With the line of a named adjoiner, to a pin | The neighbour’s own deed. | Read the direction and distance off that deed and type it as a course. |
| Along the right of way line of a named road | The recorded plat or highway plan that fixes the margin. | Take the margin’s own courses from that plan. |
| The line described in a book and page | Another recorded instrument. | Resolve the line from that instrument and type the resolved course. |
| North to the northeast corner of the northwest quarter of said section | The PLSS grid, which is asked to supply the distance. | Work out the distance, then write it as an ordinary course. |
Where the referenced source is not in your hands, or itself describes the line by reference, this is survey work. There is no setting and no retry that reaches it, and Trace will not invent the course.
Tell these apart from courses that do plot
A road, a creek or a monument in a course is not itself the problem. Most road margin courses in real deeds still give a direction and a distance, and those plot normally. So does a course that ends at a named monument, because the monument only labels the point and never moves the geometry. The problem is a missing direction or a missing distance, not the thing being named.
What Trace does with one of these
It depends which way in you used.
- In the manual plotting editor, the line is marked with an error beside it and then left out of the traverse. The rest of the description still plots, and the area, perimeter and closure are reported for the courses that remain, with nothing to say a course is missing. When a call will not plot covers finding it.
- On the AI document path, a description written this way comes back with a Referential Legal Description warning, or a Plss Boundary References warning where a section corner is doing the work. The warning names the condition; the description still lands on the map if you add it. See the document queue.
The credit is spent either way, because a description with plottable courses on both sides of a referential one still returns a boundary. Reading for these before you upload is what saves the pass. See Read your description before you upload it.
Fixing one in the editor
Once you have the resolved direction and distance from the other source, the course is ordinary. Type it in place of the referential line and it plots like any other.
Where the referential course is the last one, closing back to the point of beginning, you do not need the other source at all: a line holding only ? asks Trace to solve the closing course from the ones around it. One solved course is allowed per tract, and Trace marks the result, because the solution is only as good as the other courses.
Related
- What Trace can and cannot plot, for the four outcomes
- Read your description before you upload it, for spotting these first
- When a call will not plot, for finding a course that was left out
- Deed syntax reference, for writing the resolved course
- The document queue, for the warnings on the AI path