Form 9600-2
Islands can be a particular source of semantic confusion.
Form 9600-2, Application for Survey of Islands or Other Omitted Public Lands, might lead you to believe that island areas fall under Omitted Lands definitions.
Actually, whether or not the United States decides to survey either depends on different sets of judgment.
Omitted Islands v. Omitted Lands
The survey of islands may not have been in the instructions to the original surveyor.
Therefore, these island areas were not erroneously omitted, which is one of the standard rules for officially treating areas as omitted land.
Under this circumstance, the islands would not be technically the same as officially designated omitted lands.
Land Adjacent to a River Bank
With islands there often arises the question as to whether an area of land adjacent to a riverbank is truly an unsurveyed island.
Unsurveyed Island
It could have been an area inadvertently omitted from the original survey.
This type of question is complex and it can have a direct bearing on the ownership of the parcel.
Cause of Erroneously Omitted Areas
As we mentioned, swamp lands are often the cause of large areas of land being erroneously omitted from an original survey.
The surveyor improperly followed the edges of the swamp instead of the true watercourse.
