The basic drawings (maps) of the land cadastre (ownership boundaries) for all public and private lands. Roanoke County's parcel maps are typically maintained at three scales which show the layout of the basic land cadastre. They are related to legal description documents, which typically constitute the record for describing boundary ownership for a given parcel (e.g., metes and bounds descriptions). Parcel maps of an area provide more than a representation of ownership. The maps serve a wide range of purposes if they are constructed with a known level of positional accuracy and integrated with other cultural and physical information. Such databases are frequently used as a multipurpose cadastre.

There are currently (2014) approximately 46,000 parcels in the County of Roanoke that are maintained by GIS Services staff on a real time basis. This polygon feature was created by digitizing our existing pen and ink manual tax maps in the early 1990s. By 1998 all annotation features had been created and real time updates was realized.

This polygon feature is part of a Editing topology along with our Zoning feature and our Administration feature.