On Wed, 30 Jul 2003 04:37:52 GMT, "John R Weiss"
wrote:

"Caliban" wrote...
Let me add that I am looking at three houses. The oldest is 15 years old.
The youngest is 7 years old, and the original owner is selling it. (I have
paperwork from the county tax office confirming this.) All are in a large
neighborhood development less than 20 years old. I see on the Internet that
title companies advertise examining the title for the last, say, 40 or 60
years. I am not convinced (yet) that whoever does the title search has much
to do at all for either of these three homes, especially for the 7-year-old,
original owner house.

What was the disposition of the land prior to the time it was subdivided and
developed?

The farm we sold a few years ago has an abstract that goes all the way
back to when the first private owner proved up on his homestead.
Between then and when we sold it, it was sold, willed, divided,
reassembled, was held in trust for a minor heir, became a revenent's
(widow's) portion, got added to another piece of land, got divided
again along a new boundary, and a few other things. There was at
least one suit over who was to be executor of a will and how much he
was going to be paid and another that was basically over "mother
always loved me best". Oh, and there were at least two agreements
with the US gov't on land banks and soil conservation (the
conservation agreement was ours; it was connected to getting a grant
to tile the waterways and do some terracing).

This is a lot of action for land that was first acquired around 1850.

The actions seemed to happen either every forty years or every forty
days, in clusters. As it happens, we know descendants of about half
the folks involved in all this, most of them connected with the more
recent events.

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer

"A MiG at your six is better than no MiG at all."
Anonymous US fighter pilot