Obtaining Plat Books
For a plat book of your county, contact the County Clerk's Office or area libraries, real estate offices and map stores.
To find plat books and other related information online consult the sources below.
Online Sources
- Farm and Home Publishers sells plat maps and directories for many Wisconsin counties and for counties in much of the Midwest.
524 River Ave North
P.O. Box 305
Belmond, IA 50421-0305
Phone: (641) 444-3508 or (800) 685-7432
Fax: (641) 444-5150
www.farmandhomepublishers.com
- Milwaukee Map Service Inc. sells plat books as well as other products for a number of Wisconsin counties.
959 North Mayfair Road
Milwaukee, WI 53226-3418
Phone: (414) 774-1300 or 800-525-3822
Fax: (414) 774-3181
www.mapservice.com or www.milwaukeemap.com - RedBarn Plat Books & Cartographic Services sells platbooks for a variety of Wisconsin counties, as well as many other locations throughout the Midwest.
232 Avenue G
Gwinn, MI 49841
Phone: (906) 346-BARN (2276)
Fax: (906) 346-2301
www.redbarnmaps.com - Rockford Map Publishers, Inc. sells plat books for most Wisconsin counties as well as plat books for counties in 17 other states.
6581 Revlon Drive
P.O. Box 6126
Belvidere, IL. 61008
Phone: (815) 544-7440 or 800-321-1MAP
Fax: (815) 544-7441 or 800-446-3530
www.rockfordmap.com
For a list of county web sites in Wisconsin use the following link. These sites will contain contact information for the County Clerk's Office.
www.wisconsin.gov/state/core/wisconsin_counties.html
About Plat Books
Plat books make use of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) to represent land ownership patterns on a county-by-county basis. They are a convenient reference for local governments, private realty, surveying companies, and the general public. Commercial plat books for Wisconsin are generally prepared by private map publishing companies in conjunction with county governments. However, recently counties have begun to update the maps themselves.
Plat books are prepared from a variety of source data including U.S. Census TIGER (digital line) files, historical local government tax parcel maps, aerial photography, and property descriptions. These records are used to produce a generalized representation of current land ownership patterns, along with planimetric features, such as roads, water bodies, and railroads.
Public and private property depicted on these plats is not considered a full or legally accurate representation of ownership interests or extents, but is a generalized picture, or snapshot-in-time, of the last deed filed on a property at the time the County Register of Deeds' records were searched. The maps then remain static until they are updated several years later. A "last deed" depiction represents only the last document filed on the property and does not necessarily reveal or resolve full ownership by title or discrepancies in the record.
Complicating this picture, some commercial firms have made it a policy to insert "intentional" errors into the plat books to protect their copyrights, claiming only 85-90% reliability. Thus, while these maps are sufficient for many general purposes, they are not adequate for detailed use requiring high accuracy or current information.
Most commercial plat books are produced as hard copy books and do not necessarily have a true "real world" or integrated mathematical foundation. Today, however, several of these companies are beginning to produce digital versions which - with proper construction, registration, integration, and research of record data - will result in more accurate, current and useful data for many users of land ownership information. Also, another recent trend in plat book publishing has been the use of multiple fill colors in the maps. Color is now being used to differentiate between different types of public lands (national, state, and county forests, public hunting/fishing grounds, state parks, etc.) as well as to indicate private lands enrolled in the state's Managed Forest Program.
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