Overview
Welcome to The Coal Fields™! We take pride in making coal leases easy to find and understand. We hope that the site is simple enough for you to find the information you are looking for without an instruction manual. Still, we certainly aren't perfect. So we thought that it is better to have an overview, just in case.
On this site, we handle two groupings of data: coal leases and the entities involved with these leases. The rest of the site is designed to help visitors such as yourself find relevant leases and their affiliated entities.
Finding Coal Leases
There are three main ways to find the claims you are looking for:
Search
The search is the simplest way to look for coal leases. Every page has a search field in the upper right corner of the page.
Browsing
Visitors can also find leases by clicking through a series of groupings to narrow down your options, or browsing. On The Coal Fields™ you can browse by several groupings: lease location or the lease's administrative office.
Starting at the United States of America page, you can view the number of leases that are in each state and narrow your search from state to county to township to lease.
Alternatively, with the administrative areas approach, you can group leases by area, state, district, and field offices.
Using the Maps
We area also very proud of our mapping functionality. We have even written a blog post explaining their functionality and how you can get the most out of maps on The Coal Fields™: Understanding Maps.
Finding Coal Lease Owners
"Owners" can be companies, private individuals, agencies, etc. We call all of these entities involved in coal Leases "owners." This does not mean that these "owners" legally do or ever did own a lease. A lot of them did, so it is simpler and easier to understand that term, but some of these were agents, applicants, and the like.
There are many different methods of searching for owners:
Search
Searching for owners is the same deal as searching for leases. The search field works for both. Yet, given that there are so many claims out there, searching for an owner's name may return the Leases this individual owns or is affiliated with first. Fortunately, every Lease page also has links to the related owners near the bottom of the page.
Browsing
By Name
This category is quite self explanitory. We have grouped owner names by first letter, last name, and full name. This last grouping can include owners sharing the same name as well as a single owner which has, for one reason or another, multiple owner ids registered. The owner may have moved, possess leases spanning different administrative offices, or there could be a clerical error leading to multiple IDs being generated.
By Location
Also similar to the lease browsing functionality, you can browse owners by location. Even though the leases listed in The Coal Fields™ are all found in the USA, not all owners are located there. Relevant countries for owners are listed on the Browse Owners by Location page. From there, you can see the number of owners located in each country and proceed to browse from country to state to county to city to owner page.
By Category
The owner Category distinguishes entities' involvement in coal leases. Owner categories include:
By Interest Relationship
The owner Interest Relationship describes an entity's role in a lease. Possible owner interest relationships include:
Anything Else?
The Coal Fields™ is constantly updating our content and improving our features. To keep up to date, follow any of our social media accounts:
If you keep on having trouble, check out our Frequently Asked Questions page.
If you still have questions or suggestions to improve The Coal Fields™, then contact us. We are monitoring our social media for messages along with getting email through the form below:
Coal Lease News From The Coal Fields™
Learn more about the Bureau of Land Management, Public Land Survey System, and coal leases.
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Understanding Lease Ownership
We receive lots of emails from people who find their name or a relative’s name on our site and want to know if this means they have some right to the land listed under that name.
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Understanding BLM Administrative Areas
Whether it is filing a lease or researching one, the administering BLM office is going to be the definitive source.
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Understanding Location Data
Lease handled by the Bureau of Land Management are not mapped by latitude and longitude, instead, these leases harken back to the Public Land Survey System.
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Understanding Townships
A “township” can refer to two different things. Both are part of the PLSS measurement system but have different uses.