I asked this question over on the ESRI geonet site, but haven't had any luck there, sorry for the duplication...
I'm working on digitizing a group of maps from the 1950's that show locations of easements along a pipeline. The easement boundaries are recorded with quadrant bearings and distances in feet. (I'm not sure if it's international feet or survey feet, and according to a few sources it shouldn't make much difference? Would love to have someone confirm that though.)
I'm using the Traverse tool to draw the easement parcels, and trying to figure out if I need to do a ground-to-grid correction. The original maps indicate that the basis of bearings is "State Plane Coordinates (Lambert System) California Grid Zone V," with no specific indication of declination or any other corrections. I want the file that I'm creating to be in State Plane CA Grid Zone V (Lambert) as well. So, my first question is: Do I even need to bother with a ground-to-grid correction? And if so, can anyone shed any light on how to find the right correction angle?
Along with this, I'm wondering about keeping everything accurate since I'll need to go from NAD27 (on the original maps) to NAD83 (to play nice with current files). My plan of attack right now is to: 1) create the easement feature class and set the coordinate system to NAD27 in the appropriate SP zone 2) Draw easement polygons 3) Project into NAD83. Would this workflow keep the features accurate? (Or, any suggestions on other/better ways to do it?)
Hope this is clear; dealing with datum/projection details isn't my forte.