In five pages reading and interpreting real estate deeds are discussed with deed description mistakes and how to find them also included. Four sources are cited in the bibliography.
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and the surveyors. Few know how to read the legal description of their own homes or properties. As it has been said, knowledge is power, and sometimes what one doesnt
know about legal descriptions can come back to cause trouble in the future. Therefore, it is a vital necessity that the average layperson known how to read and understand what
goes into the legal description, and what some of the common errors are when these are drawn up. Deeds are records of land ownership and transactions. They can date back
to before the American Revolution. They reveal much more than ownership, however. They may also give information about relative land values, about who could hold land, and about relationships between
people. Deeds are useful to genealogists, those buying and selling land, and those wishing to find information about particular times or events. To find out the history of a piece
of real estate, the researcher can work backward or forward from one deed to the next. Each deed tells who gave the right of possession of the land to whom.
The list of owners in succession is called the chain of title. Trying to reconstruct the chain of title by searching through the deeds is called a title search.
Of course, some of the sections in a deed are no brainers. They do not require a lot of thought. For example, the State,
County and Section, range, township and section numbers, are fairly self explanatory. However, some may not be familiar with the terms: range or section numbers. This refers to the actual
coordinates, longitudinal and latitudinal, of the property. Here is an example of what this section might typically look like: "Beginning at a point in the center line of SR 1006,