Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Finding no transfer in the current volume you would take the preceding grantor vol-
ume from the shelf which might span the years 1995-1998. You would repeat this
procedure until you either found the transfer or until you reached the volume con-
taining the year 1941, the year you knew Mary Conveyor purchased the property.
Here is another example. Suppose you have agreed to purchase a house and land
from Robert Byre and want to obtain copies of the deeds of all of the prior convey-
ances of the subject parcel of land. You do not know from whom Robert Byre pur-
chased the property or when he bought it. You would go the current grantee index
and look under Robert Byre. Because Robert Byre is the current owner he would
have been the grantee in the deed. In this case you would have to go back through
several volumes until you got to the grantee volume dated 1965 before you discov-
ered that Robert Byer purchased the property from Mary Conveyor in January of
1965. The record would give you the topic and page where the deed was recorded.
To trace the title further back in time you would start with the date January
1965 and look in the grantee topic for that year under Mary Conveyor. You would
again look through a number of topics, each one earlier in time, until you got to
the 1941 topic which listed Mary Conveyor as grantee of the subject parcel. This
record would give the name of Mary Conveyor's grantor which you would then
use as grantee to continue to trace the title back through the grantee topics. The
preceding is an example of what is called the
Chain of Title
. For any parcel of
land that has gone through a sequence of conveyances each deed represents a link
in the chain.
The second type of indexing system is the tract or parcel index. This approach
is considered by many knowledgeable practitioners to be a much better system
than the grantee-grantor index. Some of those familiar with the system question
why it is used in such a small number of states. The tract index has a page or sev-
eral pages of entries relating to some tract of land such as a quarter section, sub-
division, or individual parcel of land. In a tract index it is the parcel of land that
indexes the recorded documents associated with it. If one is interested in the chain
of title of a particular parcel one goes to the index for that parcel and retrieves a
history of recorded documents affecting title.
Most deeds contain a reference to the topic and page of the deed under which
the grantor acquired title. In some jurisdictions this reference is a requirement and
a deed will not be accepted for recording unless it contains the necessary language.
9.9 Chain of Title Problems
From a surveyor's perspective, one purpose of searching the chain of title to prop-
erty is to determine if there have been conveyances out of a parcel of land which
could change the boundaries of the property being surveyed. Another reason that
the chain of title is important is to determine junior and senior rights of parcels of
land derived from a common grantor. We will discuss the importance of this later
on, but suffice it to say that it is important, for a number of reasons, to be able to
trace each deed in the chain.
