Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
of the system. Each of the documents is indexed by the government employees.
These documents are placed chronologically into consecutively numbered volumes.
The government does not take responsibility for the contents of the documents and
it takes no position relative to the state of the title evidenced by the documents. The
responsibility for placing conveyances on record is solely with the individual parties
to the transaction. The government only records documents presented for recording.
These documents must often meet certain formal requirements imposed by the juris-
diction in order to be accepted for recording.
9.8 Recording System Index
A recorder's office contains two basic types of volumes:
Indexes
and the
volumes
containing copies of the recorded documents
. Two types of indexing are in com-
mon use. One is a grantor-grantee name index and the second is a tract or parcel
index.
The first type indexes documents by the names of the parties. In this system
there are two sets of indexes: the
Grantor index
and the
Grantee index
. As noted
earlier, the grantor is the person who sells or transfers property and a grantee is
the person who acquires the property. A grantor index volume will contain the
names of grantors arranged in alphabetical order. Each index volume might cover
a year or span several years of recorded documents, depending upon the capacity
of the volume and the number of transactions. A typical index volume consists of
an alphabetical listing of grantors who recorded documents between certain dates,
such as during the past year.
If a researcher only has the name of a grantor and does not know the approxi-
mate year of the transfer it may be necessary to search through many volumes in
order to find the deed reference. The same is true for the grantee index.
An example may make the preceding description of grantor-grantee indexes
clearer. Suppose “Mary Conveyor” conveys a parcel of land to “Robert Byre” in
January of 1965 and the deed is immediately presented for recording. The record-
er's office will place an entry in the current grantor index listing Mary Conveyor
as grantor. Depending on the policy of the particular recorder's office, additional
information may also be placed in the record. This information is usually the name
of the grantee, the date of the conveyance, the general location of the property
and the topic and page of the volume in which the deed can be found. The same
information is also recorded in the grantee index but in this case entry would be
indexed in the name of Robert Byre, the grantee.
The grantor-grantee index allows a person to find a conveyance if they know the
name of either the grantor or the grantee. Using the preceding example, suppose
you knew or suspected that Mary Conveyor purchased many parcels of real estate in
1941 and wanted to know if she had sold a particular parcel sometime between 1941
and the present. You could start with the most recent grantor index volume and look
up the name “Conveyor, Mary”. Say the current volume spanned 1999 to the present.
