There were several ways to acquire first title to lands, but usually they followed the four steps of petitions, warrants, survey/plat, and grant/patent. The petition is a request to take up land. The warrant certifies the right to a specific acreage and authorizes an official surveyor to survey it, assuming no prior and conflicting claims. The plat, sometimes called a survey, is the surveyor's drawing of the legal descriptions so that the land is identifiable. The patent/grant is the government's or proprietor's passing of title to the patentee/grantee. This is the first-title deed and the true beginning of private ownership of the land. Land grants are especially useful in genealogical research for locating an individual in a particular place and time. (Taken from Luebking, Sandra Hargreaves. Research In Land and Tax Records. In The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy, ed. Loretto Dennis Szucs and Sandra Hargreaves Luebking (Salt Lake City: Ancestry, 1997).

Source Information
Jackson, Ronald Vern, ed. Index to South Carolina Land Grants 1784-1800. Bountiful, Utah: Accelerated Indexing Systems, Inc., 1977.