Texas Abstract

A Texas abstract is a unique numeric identifier the Texas General Land Office (GLO) assigned to each original land grant within a Texas county. Abstract numbers are the most common way Texas land is identified — written as A-123 Reeves County or Abstract No. 475, Midland County. They are the Texas equivalent of (but very different from) the PLSS section reference used in the other 30 PLSS states.

How Abstract Numbers Work

Each Texas county maintains its own sequence of abstract numbers, starting at 1 and running into the thousands depending on county size. Critically, abstract references are scoped to the county — A-123 in Reeves County is a completely different parcel than A-123 in Bowie County or Bexar County. Omitting the county makes the reference ambiguous.

The abstract number itself has no geographic meaning. Numbers were assigned roughly in order of grant date, often indexed alphabetically by grantee, so you cannot infer location from the number.

Each abstract entry at GLO contains the abstract number, the original grantee's name, the survey name, the patent date, the acreage, and references to the original surveyor's field notes and survey plat.

Where Abstracts Are Used

Abstract-only descriptions are the dominant TXSS convention in:

• East Texas (Bowie, Cass, Harrison, Panola) — Piney Woods grants
• Coastal Bend (Aransas, Refugio, San Patricio) — empresario-era grants
• Small-grant counties scattered through Central Texas

In West Texas — the Permian Basin and Trans-Pecos — abstracts coexist with Block & Section descriptions. The same parcel can have both an abstract number and a Block + Section reference.

How Abstracts Differ from PLSS Sections

A PLSS section is always (~)640 acres, square, and indexed by Section + Township + Range + Meridian. A Texas abstract is:

• Irregular in shape (defined by original field notes)
• Variable in size (a few acres to tens of thousands)
• Indexed by (county, abstract number) only
• Numbered with no geographic pattern

For a deeper comparison, see Texas Abstracts.

Reading an Abstract Reference

You will see abstracts written in several equivalent forms — Township America's parser accepts all of them:

• A-123 Reeves County, TX
• A 123 Reeves County
• Abstract 250, Bowie County
• Abs. 89 Upton County, TX
• Abst. 47 Pecos County

In a deed or RRC filing, you may see the abstract embedded in a longer description, often paired with a survey name:

200 acres out of the W.B. Rogers Survey, Abstract No. 475, Midland County, Texas

Here the survey name (W.B. Rogers) gives the colloquial identifier; the abstract number (475) gives the GLO index reference.

Converting an Abstract to GPS

Township America's converter accepts abstract references in any format. The response includes the centroid, polygon, computed acreage, county FIPS code, and the canonical survey name. For practical use, see the TXSS abstracts deep-dive and the Convert Texas Abstract guide.