Lumpkin County Deed Records: Where They Are and How to Search Them

Lumpkin County deed records are kept by the Clerk of Superior Court, the custodian of the county’s land and property records (Lumpkin County Clerk). The office is at 325 Riley Road, Room 108, in Dahlonega, open Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., excluding holidays, phone 706-864-3736 (Lumpkin County Clerk). You can search its deed, lien and plat dockets online through GSCCCA, the statewide clerks’ system. Other parts of a property’s paper trail live in other offices: estates at Probate Court, parcel maps with the Tax Assessor, tax bills with the Tax Commissioner.

Which office holds which record

“Property records” and “deed records” are not the same thing. The Tax Assessor values property for taxation and keeps the parcel map; ownership itself is shown by the deeds recorded at the Clerk’s office (O.C.G.A. § 44-2-1). Use the Assessor’s record to find the parcel and the owner’s name, then go to the deeds. The offices below list their published addresses, phones and hours.

How to search Lumpkin County deeds on GSCCCA, step by step

1. Find the parcel. Look the property up on the county’s qPublic site to get the owner of record and the parcel number (Lumpkin County). Vacant land often has no street address, because Lumpkin County assigns E-911 addresses only to structures (Lumpkin County FAQ), so search land by owner name or parcel.
2. Choose a GSCCCA account. The index can be searched without images; viewing and printing documents takes one of the paid accounts in the table below.
3. Search the real estate index by name. Select Lumpkin County, search the current owner’s name, and find the deed into that owner. The deed index covers all Georgia counties since at least January 1, 1999 (GSCCCA).
4. Walk the chain backward. Each deed names a seller (grantor) who was the buyer (grantee) in an earlier deed. Search that name, find that deed, and repeat. Note each document’s book and page; a citation looks like Deed Book 123, Page 45.
5. Run every owner through the lien index. The lien dockets hold liens on land or personal property filed under state or federal law, other than UCC filings, since at least January 1, 2004 (GSCCCA).
6. Pull the plat. If a deed refers to a recorded plat, find it in the plat index, which covers plats and maps since at least January 1, 2004 (GSCCCA).
7. Go to the Clerk’s office for anything older than the online index reaches. GSCCCA says its historical indexes were re-created from document images, and the Clerk’s index is the official one wherever the two differ (GSCCCA terms of use).
8. Check Probate and taxes. If an owner in the chain died, ask Probate Court whether an estate was opened. Ask the Tax Commissioner whether taxes are paid.

These subscription prices took effect July 1, 2025 (GSCCCA fee changes).

Reading a Lumpkin County legal description

Most Lumpkin County deeds do not describe land by street address. They place it in a land lot, district and section, then describe the tract by a recorded plat or by courses and distances. A description reads like this format example (not a real parcel): Land Lot 123, 12th District, 1st Section, Lumpkin County, Georgia.

That grid comes from the 1832 lotteries. The Cherokee territory was divided into four sections, each divided into districts, including 33 gold districts (Georgia Archives). Land lots were distributed in the sixth land lottery and gold lots in the seventh, the Gold Lottery (Georgia Archives). About a third of the land districts were designated gold districts of 40-acre lots, separate from the 160-acre land lots (Georgia Archives). Lumpkin County itself was created by a law passed December 3, 1832, that divided original Cherokee County into ten counties (Georgia Archives).

The grid still matters today.A recordable Georgia plat must show “all applicable land lots, land districts, sections, reserves, or militia districts” where the property lies (O.C.G.A. § 15-6-67), and a surveyor’s written description must call out the land lot, district, section and county (Ga. Comp. R. and Regs. 180-7). Our article on how to read a Lumpkin County legal description takes a full description apart call by call.

Plats: approval comes before recording

In Lumpkin County a plat must be reviewed and approved by the county Planning Department before the Clerk will record it (Lumpkin County FAQ). Planning charges a plat review fee of $35.00 per plat, paid before review (Lumpkin County Planning). Plats have been filed electronically through GSCCCA since January 1, 2017, at 300 DPI, and the Clerk’s office has a public filing computer for them (Lumpkin County Clerk). Inside Dahlonega city limits, the city’s Community Development Department handles planning, zoning and plats. What a plat must show, and how surveys affect a title policy, is on surveys and boundaries.

Copies and certified copies

Copies of recorded deeds and plats come from the Clerk of Courts office in the Judicial Center at 325 Riley Road (Lumpkin County FAQ). Online, GSCCCA charges $0.50 per printed page, which it says is the same cost as copying a page at the courthouse (GSCCCA). The Clerk’s web page does not publish a fee schedule for recording or certified copies, so confirm fees with the Clerk’s office at 706-864-3736 before you go. For a map, the Assessor’s public mapping computer prints an aerial map of a property for $5 (Lumpkin County FAQ).

Find your path through the records

Pick what you know (an address, a name, a parcel number, a book and page or a plat) and what you want (the owner, liens, the plat, taxes or an estate), and the Records Path lays out the order of the search.

When the records raise questions

A gap in the chain, an owner who died without an estate being opened, an open security deed or a lien nobody can explain are title questions, not search questions. If an owner died, read heirs property in Georgia. For what each kind of lien means and how it ends, see liens and judgments. For what a full examination adds to your own search, see title search explained. For what a specific record does to your title, ask a Georgia real estate attorney. Recording fees and the PT-61 transfer tax form are covered on our sister guide to Dahlonega closings.

Questions people ask