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Your deed, the county records, the pins in the ground, and where each of them stops.
Finding your property lines starts with paper, not with a tape measure. Your deed carries the legal description of what you own, and in Georgia that is usually written in metes and bounds: a written walk around the perimeter, one call at a time. Each call gives a direction, such as North 42 degrees East, and a distance, running from a defined point of beginning around the tract and back. The calls often reference whatever stood there when the description was written: an iron pin, a creek, a road centerline, or the adjoining owner's name.
Georgia has no township-and-range grid. Land here was granted by the State of Georgia rather than the federal government, so the federal rectangular survey system never applied. Georgia distributed land instead through eight lotteries held between 1805 and 1833, dividing counties into districts and numbered land lots. Those numbers still matter: land lot and district numbers appear in Georgia legal descriptions today, and for land in the original Cherokee County a section number appears as well.
If a plat has been recorded for your property, get a copy. It turns those written calls into a drawing. Our guide to reading a survey plat explains what the bearings, symbols and notes mean.
Under O.C.G.A. § 44-2-1, deeds are recorded with the Clerk of Superior Court of the county where the land lies. Not the county you live in, and not the county on your mailing address. Several Georgia cities sit in more than one county, so an address alone does not tell you which courthouse holds your deed. Plats are governed by O.C.G.A. § 15-6-67, the Georgia Plat Act, which directs the clerk to file and record plats and sets the standards a plat must meet to go on record.
Much of this you can search from home. The Georgia Superior Court Clerks' Cooperative Authority hosts a statewide Real Estate Index and Plat Index. An index points you to the book and page. For certified copies, and for older books never fully indexed, you go to the clerk's office. Pull the deeds of the tracts touching yours too. They describe the same lines from the other side, and that comparison is where a discrepancy usually first shows itself.
Nearly every county in Northwest Georgia publishes a parcel map online, many through qPublic. They are useful for orientation: your parcel number, the acreage on file, the owners around you.
Here is the part that matters. These are tax assessment maps. They are built for property valuation, not for legal boundary determination. The lines were digitized from deeds, plats and aerial photography of varying age and accuracy, then fitted together to cover an entire county. They can be off by many feet, they are not survey grade, and the counties say so in their own disclaimers. The same caution applies to the parcel layers in phone mapping and hunting apps, which draw on the same data.
Do not set a fence, a building, a driveway or a corner marker based on a GIS parcel map. It is a common way an owner ends up with a problem that costs far more to correct than to avoid.
Once you know what your deed calls for, go look for the physical evidence. Surveyors call these monuments:
An inexpensive metal detector will turn up pins invisible from the surface. Start from a corner you are confident in, measure the bearing and distance your deed calls for, and search there.
Two cautions. First, an old fence is not evidence of a boundary by itself. Fences get built where the ground was easiest to work, or by someone guessing, and one can stand in the wrong spot for fifty years without ever becoming the line. Second, a pin you find is not automatically your pin. Markers get struck by equipment, pulled, or driven by people never licensed to set them. Finding one is a clue. Proving it belongs to your corner is survey work. Whether long use of a fence line has changed anyone's legal rights is a question for an attorney.
Everything above tells you what your deed says and roughly where you are standing. None of it establishes where your line legally falls on the ground. In Georgia, only a licensed Professional Land Surveyor can retrace a boundary, resolve conflicts between the written record and the field evidence, and prepare a plat that carries legal weight.
Bring one in when you are buying or selling, when corners cannot be found, when your deed and your neighbor's describe the same line differently, when you are building near a line, or when a lender or permit office asks. A boundary survey establishes and documents your perimeter. A residential property survey covers the situation most homeowners are in. If you only need to see the line before you build or clear, property line marking puts flagged stakes on it.
If a neighbor already disagrees, get the survey first and the legal advice second. Boundary disputes, adverse possession claims and easement rights are legal questions for an attorney, who works from the facts a survey produces. See our articles on property line disputes in Georgia and whether you need a survey before building a fence.
S&S Land Surveying LLC is a family-owned firm at 549 West Ave in Cedartown, founded at the end of 2021 by William "Bart" Sims, who brings more than 40 years of surveying experience. We is a licensed Georgia surveying firm, rated 4.9 stars across 50+ Google reviews, working throughout Polk, Floyd, Bartow, Paulding, Carroll, Haralson, Douglas and Gordon counties and the wider Northwest Georgia and metro Atlanta region.
Tell us the address or parcel number, roughly how much land is involved, and whether you already have a plat. We will put together a free, no-obligation estimate for your property.
You can get a good idea from your deed and recorded plat, and by locating existing corner monuments. What you cannot do without a licensed surveyor is establish where the line legally falls, or produce a document a county, lender or neighbor will rely on.
No. County GIS and qPublic maps are assessment tools built for property valuation, not boundary determination. They are useful for orientation and for finding parcel numbers, but they are not survey grade and should never be used to place a fence or a structure.
Most commonly an iron pin or length of rebar driven flush with or just below the ground, often with a plastic or aluminum cap stamped with the surveyor’s registration number. Older tracts may be marked by pipes, axles or stones. A metal detector helps, since pins are frequently buried.
Not on its own. Fences get built for convenience, get replaced, and drift over time. A fence may sit on the line, inside it, or well across it. Only a survey establishes where the boundary actually runs.
Call us today at 678-873-3119 or request a free estimate online.