Re: How long is a Chain?

[John Cleverdon <johnc@cdi.com.au>]

Bradley Torr wrote:

> <snip>
>
> And important to surveyors... and conveyancers... and urban planners... and
> cartographers... and GIS specialists... and railway historians..... :-) You
> wouldn't believe how many property records and title deeds and cadastral
> maps out there are still in the olde archaic measurements... roods, rods,
> perches, chains, acres, etc. Spending countless afternoons going through
> property records and deposited plans at the local council archives and at
> the Lands Titles Office while at uni certainly taught me all about these!

I'm currently working on the Land Titles Automation Project here in Victoria,
and I am processing titles each day (anything from 40-80!). So I am used to
measurements in metres, feet & inches, or links (few are in chains). Thankfully,
we have macros in the software we use which will do the conversions easily for
us.
On problem though is that on the earlier titles (some we are working on go back
to WW1-era) have very small handwriting, so reading dimensions on the scanned-in
titles can be very difficult - especially with tenths of links. This provides
plenty of work for those from the Land Registry Victoria (formerly the Titles
Office) who help us.
One made the comment (I'm not sure how seriously) that in the past, the
draftsman used to compete with each other to see who had the smallest writing -
well it's now quite a headache for us :-(

John
--
John Cleverdon, B.App.Sc. (Cartography), AMMSIA
Land Titles Automation Project - Beveridge & Williams, Melbourne
Amateur astronomer & Railway enthusiast | Bombers - 2000 AFL Premiers
E-mail:  johnc@cdi.com.au | Phone: 03 5987 1535 (H) | Dromana, Victoria
The Locomotive Page: http://www.railpage.org.au/loco
Astronomical Society of Frankston: http://www.cdi.com.au/~johnc/asf.htm