How to Read a 19th-Century Deed Book

The first deed book I ever read properly, as opposed to flipping through, took me an entire afternoon to get through four pages. I had assumed land records would work like a phone book: look up the name, read the answer. What I found instead was a run of long, looping paragraphs that all seemed to say the same thing, studded with "said" and "aforesaid," bounded by beech trees and heaps of stones, and written by a clerk whose capital S looked like everyone else's L.

It gets easier, and quickly. Deed books are among the most formulaic records a town or county ever produced, which is exactly what makes them readable once you know the formula. What follows is written for historians and genealogists. If you're buying or selling property, you need a title examiner or an attorney, not a local historian.

What's actually in the book

A deed book isn't a collection of deeds. It's a collection of copies. When a deed was brought in for recording, the clerk (a town clerk in much of New England, a county register or recorder of deeds in most other places) copied it word for word into the book, noted when it was received, and handed the original back to the new owner. The original may or may not survive in a family's papers; the book copy is the public record.

So deeds appear in the order they were recorded, not the order they were signed, and clerks could miscopy a name or a number. The books also hold more than sales: mortgages (in some places kept in separate books), leases, rights of way, agreements about fences and water.

You may well be working from microfilm or scans rather than the volumes. Our guide to imaging and microfilm as preservation copies explains how those copies are usually made, which helps when you're trying to judge whether a blur is in the film or in the original.

Start at the index

Most runs of deed books have two indexes. The grantor index (the direct index) lists transactions under the person conveying the land. The grantee index (the reverse index) lists them under the person receiving it. Each entry gives the other party, the kind of instrument, and the book and page.

Arrangements vary. Some indexes are strictly alphabetical. Others group surnames only by first letter, in recording order. Some printed systems subdivide each letter by the first letter of the given name or the first vowel of the surname, which is baffling until you find the key printed inside the front cover. Look for it before deciding a name isn't there.

Search generously. Clerks spelled names the way they heard them. Watch for "et ux." (and wife) and "et al." (and others), and remember that estates are often indexed under the administrator's or executor's name.

A worked example (invented)

Everything in the example below is made up: the people, the land, the price and the town. The language, though, is typical of a warranty deed from the 1840s in northern New England, and you'll meet versions of every phrase in real books.

Know all men by these presents, That I, Ezra Pellingham of said town, yeoman, in consideration of three hundred and twenty dollars to me paid by Josiah Marsh of the same town, blacksmith, the receipt whereof I do hereby acknowledge, do hereby give, grant, bargain, sell and convey unto the said Josiah Marsh, his heirs and assigns forever, a certain piece of land lying in said town, and bounded as follows, viz. Beginning at a stake and stones on the easterly side of the highway leading to the mills; thence N 78° E 46 rods to a beech tree marked; thence S 12° E 30 rods to a heap of stones by land of the Widow Abbott; thence S 78° W 46 rods to said highway; thence northerly by said highway 30 rods to the bound begun at; containing eight acres and one hundred rods, be the same more or less.

To have and to hold the above granted premises, with all the privileges and appurtenances thereto belonging, to him the said Josiah Marsh, his heirs and assigns forever. And I do covenant that I am lawfully seized in fee of the premises; that they are free of all incumbrances; that I have good right to sell and convey the same; and that I will warrant and defend the same against the lawful claims and demands of all persons. And I, Sarah Pellingham, wife of the said Ezra, do hereby relinquish all my right of dower in the above granted premises. In witness whereof we have hereunto set our hands and seals this fourteenth day of April, A.D. 1847.

Below that come two witnesses, an acknowledgment before a justice of the peace, and the clerk's line: received for record on such a day at such an hour.

Reading the formula, piece by piece

The parties. Names come with a residence and often an occupation: yeoman (a farmer who owned his land), gentleman, widow, spinster (simply an unmarried woman), cordwainer (shoemaker). Small gifts to a historian.

The consideration. In this period the figure is often the real price, though not always; a deed between relatives might name a token sum. Later in the century, "one dollar and other valuable consideration" becomes common, largely to keep the price private.

The granting words. "Give, grant, bargain, sell and convey" signals an outright transfer, normally followed by warranties. A quitclaim uses different verbs ("remise, release and forever quitclaim") and passes only whatever interest the grantor happens to have, with no promises. Quitclaims are wonderful for family history: when a father died without a will, his children often quitclaimed their shares to one sibling, producing a document that names every heir, their spouses and where each was living.

The habendum. "To have and to hold" states what estate the grantee receives; "his heirs and assigns forever" marks full ownership rather than a life interest.

The covenants. Seized in fee, free of encumbrances, good right to convey, warrant and defend: these promises are what make a warranty deed. Their absence is itself a clue.

The dower release. Sarah's sentence tells you Ezra was married in 1847 and gives you her first name, which for many women of the period appears almost nowhere else in the public record.

The dates. Look for three: signed, acknowledged and recorded. They can be days or years apart, and the gaps sometimes tell a story of their own.

Metes and bounds

Our invented parcel is described by metes (distances and directions) and bounds (markers and neighbors). You need a few units:

So 46 rods by 30 rods comes to 1,380 square rods. Divide by 160 and you get 8 acres with 100 square rods left over: "eight acres and one hundred rods." Real deeds rarely add up so tidily; surveyors worked over rough ground with chains that stretched.

A bearing like "N 78° E" means face north, then turn 78 degrees toward the east. Bearings were taken with a magnetic compass, and magnetic north drifts over the decades, so a modern survey of the same line will read differently. Don't assume an error.

The bounds are where the history lives. Stakes and stones, marked trees, a highway "leading to the mills": the landmarks of a working landscape. "By land of the Widow Abbott" names an abutter, and that can lead you straight to the next family's deeds.

Plot it if you can. A protractor and graph paper turn a paragraph into a shape, and when neighboring deeds are plotted together a lost neighborhood appears. Much of the Midwest and West, surveyed under the federal rectangular system, uses section, township and range instead, but the reading habits carry over.

Abbreviations you'll meet

"Jno" is John, not Jonathan, a trap that has sent more than one family tree astray. "Jr." and "Sr." need care too: they often just distinguished two men of the same name in the same town, who weren't necessarily father and son.

The clerks' hands

If you've read about secretary hand, set it aside. That angular script belongs to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and turns up only in the earliest colonial records. Nineteenth-century clerks wrote round hand, the flowing, slanted copybook script often called copperplate, and from mid-century many had learned the Spencerian style with its looped capitals. By the 1880s and 1890s you'll see typewritten pages and printed deed forms with the particulars written into blanks.

Round hand is generally kind to readers, but every clerk had habits:

• Capital I and J are often identical; capital S, L and sometimes G look alike; so do T and F.
• A lowercase e can look like a c, and runs of n, u, m and i dissolve into waves. Count the downstrokes.
• A doubled s is often written with a tall first letter, so a name like Bissell seems to contain an f or a p.
• The numeral 1 sometimes carries a flag that makes it look like a 7.

When you hit a hard word, find the same clerk writing a word you're sure of and compare letters. Better still, make a one-page alphabet for each clerk. The handwriting changes when the clerk does, which incidentally tells you when a new one took office.

Notes in the margin

Don't skip the margins. That's where the story carries on.

The most common marginal note beside a mortgage is a discharge: a few lines, often signed by the lender, stating that the debt is paid in full, with a date. Sometimes the margin refers you to a separate discharge in a later book. Either way, it tells you a family paid off its farm, and when. You'll also find cross-references ("see Book 22, page 41"), assignments of mortgages, and corrections.

Older volumes carry scars of their own: tape over torn edges, loose leaves, faded ink. Tell the clerk rather than fixing anything yourself; our pieces on removing old tape from records and conservation treatments for records and volumes explain why.

Following the land backward

A historical chain of title traces one piece of land through its owners. Here's how I go about it:

1. Start in the present. Find the current deed through the land records or the assessor. Later deeds often include a source clause, "being the same premises conveyed to me by ... recorded in Book ..., Page ...." Follow it.
2. Work back through the grantee index. For each owner, find the deed by which they acquired the land, then read it for the owner before them.
3. Expect gaps. Land that passed by inheritance has no sale deed; look in probate for the will, the inventory and any division among heirs, then for quitclaims among them. Watch for tax collector's deeds, sheriff's deeds after a lawsuit, and deeds never recorded at all.
4. Then work forward with the grantor index to catch pieces sold off over the years.
5. Keep a table: date, grantor, grantee, instrument, book and page, acreage, price, abutters. The abutters column has a way of turning into a map of the neighborhood.

It takes time. The pleasure is in what you collect on the way: a dower release that hands you a woman's name, a quitclaim listing eight siblings scattered across three states, a margin note showing a mortgage paid off the same spring a son came home. The deed book was never meant to tell those stories. Read it slowly and it tells them anyway.