Landed History

When you purchase a house--or, more accurately, you get the bank to purchase it and begin paying them back for it--someone has to go through your title. The title is the legal document that says who holds a piece of property, and what conditions there may be on its ownership. Most of us never really look at our titles, because we pay lawyers to do that.

But in our neck of the woods there's much talk and some beginning action on drilling natural gas wells. We have an easement on our property, so I decided it might be wise to know whether the conditions of our easement would subject us to particular stresses from drilling companies. Thus I retrieved our abstract of title--the document that gives a relatively succinct account of the property's attributes--and made an electronic copy of it for our records.

I say the abstract of title is "relatively succinct" because here's what one hundred years' worth of property dealings looks like spread out on the floor:

One hundred years of buying, selling, dividing, conditioning, easing, and gifting. And of all the sixty-some names that occur on these documents, each one has a story of living here, working here, and raising families here. If only in the names (and not the legalese that of necessity fills these crinkly pages), one gets a snapshot of lives intersecting with the soil. These are abstracts of life lived in the town of Colesville, New York.

I had to separate four generations of documents that lawyers have no problem stapling together rather willy-nilly. Thus, as a side effect, I discovered that in the 1960s they had really tough staples. If you want to try this at home, get a staple remover ready.

~emrys