Deeds – Using Deeds to research the history of your house
As I mentioned in my “Researching Home History” article, before you can begin researching a home, you must have the legal description of the property, which can be obtained by looking at the deed you received when you purchased the property. If you are very lucky, you received a statement of the property when you bought your house. Also known as a chain of title, an abstract contains a legal description of the property, as well as all transactions from the property to the patent holder, the original purchaser of the property from the federal government. References to deeds, mortgages, wills, probate records, divorces, and lawsuits may be included in the summary. In the past, statements were routinely prepared and updated by the owner’s mortgage company each time a home changed hands. This practice fell by the wayside when title insurance began to replace statements in the 1970s. If there is no statement, you will need to form a chain of title through other records.
Most chain of title searches will start at your local county Registrar of Deeds office. This office has records and files of writing instruments that affect real estate or personal property. Deeds are the starting point in your search for records, as they will tell you the names of previous owners and give you clues as to what may have been located on the property at the time the deed was drawn up. A deed tells you who owned the property, the purchase price, provides a legal description, and possibly if there was a mortgage. You can also mention the existence of the house and the additions to it. A sharp increase in the purchase price may indicate that a building has been added to the property. Pay close attention to the legal description on each deed you find to ensure you’re still looking for the right property. The fact that the correct licensee or licensor is listed does not mean that it is necessarily owned by you. Make sure each legal description matches yours.
Before you begin your search through the scriptures, you will need to familiarize yourself with two terms: grantor and grantee. The grantor is the seller of the property and is usually listed first. The Beneficiary is the buyer. So when looking at his own deed, he will show up as the Dealer and the person he bought the house from will show up as the Grantor. Starting with yourself as the buyer, you can work backwards through the deed indexes to find previous sellers/buyers. Usually the previous deed will be mentioned in the current deed, and you can see when the current grantor was a dealer. Otherwise, you will need to look up the current grantor in the beneficiary indexes. In fact, it’s a good idea to search for all the owners of your property in both indexes, because sometimes the property transaction only appears in one of the indexes. This is the method you will use to find the owners of the property. I made photocopies of every deed I found because I found it interesting to read the different descriptions of the property and because sometimes the instrument was not only listed as a deed, but was noted as something else. For example, if you come across a deed of trust, it generally does not mean that the property changed hands, but rather that the grantor is giving title to the property to a dealer (usually the person lending the money) until the grantor returns the money. loan. In its whole. It is not necessary to make the copies, but make a note of anything different about the writing.
As you find deeds to your property, check the deeds that were recorded on the pages before and after your deed. You may find other deeds related to your property. One caveat: Remember that while the deed will tell you who owned the property, it won’t tell you who lived there. You will need to look at other records to determine who actually occupied the house.
If you find references to court cases in your deeds, note them on your reference sheet, as they may contain useful information about your home or its owners. Ask the reference person at the Registrar of Deeds office where you could locate the listed records.
Make a list of all the families that owned your home, showing the dates they bought and sold the property. This sheet will be a helpful reference of all the names and time periods as you search other records for information on their families.
Now, if all of this seems overwhelming or you just aren’t interested in doing the research yourself, you can have a title insurance company obtain the list of owners for you. A fee will be charged for the service, but if you provide the company with a legal description of your property, they can do the work for you.