As I mentioned in my “Home History Research” article, before you can start 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 property summary when you bought your home. Also known as a chain of title, an abstract contains a legal description of the property as well as all transactions of the property to the patent holder, the original purchaser of the federal government property. References to deeds, mortgages, wills, probate records, divorces, and lawsuits may be included in the summary. In the past, the homeowner’s mortgage company routinely prepared and updated summaries each time a home changed ownership. This practice fell by the wayside when title insurance began to replace abstracts in the 1970s. If there is no abstract, you will need to form a title chain through other records.
Most title chain searches will begin at your local county Registrar of Deeds office. This office has records and files for writing instruments that affect real property 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 written. 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 additions to it. A sharp increase in the purchase price may indicate that a building has been added to the property. Pay careful attention to the legal description on every deed you find to make sure you are still looking for the correct property. Just because the correct dealer or grantor is listed does not necessarily mean that it is owned by you. Make sure each legal description matches yours.
Before you begin your search through the deeds, you will need to be familiar with two terms: grantor and grantee. The grantor is the seller of the property and is usually listed first. The beneficiary is the buyer. Therefore, when looking at your own deed, it will appear as the Beneficiary and the person from whom you bought the house will appear as the Grantor. Starting with yourself as a buyer, you can work back 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 Beneficiary. Otherwise, you will need to find the current Grantor in the Beneficiary Indices. In fact, it is advisable 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 get back through the property owners. 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 listed just as a deed, but was marked 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 gives title to the property to a grantee (usually the person who lends the money) until the grantor repays the loan. In its whole. It is not necessary to make the copies, but write down anything different about the writing.
When you find deeds to your property, check the deeds that were recorded on the pages before and after your deed. You can find other deeds related to your property. One 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 search other records to determine who actually occupied the home.
If you find references to court cases within your deeds, write them down 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 can locate the listed records.
Make a list of all the families who owned their home, showing the dates they bought and sold the property. This sheet will be a useful reference to all the names and time periods as you search other records to learn about their families.
Now if all of this seems overwhelming or you are just not 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.
