Deeds – Using Deeds to research the history of your house
As I mentioned in my “Home History Research” 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’re very lucky, you received a statement on the property when you bought your house. Also known as a chain of title, a summary contains a legal description of the property, as well as all transactions of the property to the patentee, the original purchaser of the property from the federal government. References to deeds, mortgages, wills, probate records, divorces, and judgments may be included in the summary. In the past, the homeowner’s mortgage company routinely prepared and updated statements 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 begin at your local county Recorder of Deed office. This office has records and files of writing instruments that affect real estate or personal property. Deeds are the starting point in your records search, 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 written. A deed tells you who owned the property, the purchase price, provides a legal description, and possibly whether 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 come across to make sure you’re still looking for the right property. Just because the right dealer or grantor is listed doesn’t mean it’s necessarily owned by you. Make sure each legal description matches yours.
Before you begin your search through the deeds, 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 Grantee and the person you bought the house from will show up as the Grantor. Starting with yourself as a buyer, you can work your way back through the deed indices to find previous sellers/buyers. Usually the prior deed will be referenced in the current deed, and you can see when the current grantor was a grantee. Otherwise, you will need to look up the current grantor in the grantee indices. In fact, it is advisable to search all the owners of your property in both indices, because sometimes the property transaction only appears in one of the indices. 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 just listed as a deed, but noted as something else. For example, if you come across a deed of trust, it generally does not mean the property has changed hands, but rather that the grantor gives title to the property to a grantee (usually the person lending the money) until the grantor returns the loan. In its whole. You don’t need to make the copies, but make 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. A word of caution: remember that while the deeds will tell you who owned the property, they 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 Recorder of Deeds office where you might 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 useful reference for all names and time periods as you search other records for information about their families.
Now, if all of this seems overwhelming or you’re just not interested in doing the research yourself, you can have a title insurance company get the list of owners for you. There will be a fee for the service, but if you provide the company with a legal description of your property, they can do the work for you.
