Title deeds are documents relating to property and land conveyance. While they are frequently used by house historians, their usefulness to genealogists as well should not be underestimated because there is much that you can discover.
Written proof of purchasing property has long been important. The earliest examples you may come across include ‘final concords’ (fines of land) from the 12th century and ‘common recoveries’ from the 15th century. Both were abolished in 1833. These early records were written in Latin until 1733, and tell us the names of the vendor and purchaser with a description of the property or land in question. These are held at The National Archives (TNA) at Kew and local archives.
The most likely historical deeds that you will come across are a ‘bargain and sale’ and a ‘lease and release’. These date from the 16th century to the 19th. Within these records you can discover the names of those involved in the transaction, the date that the conveyance occurred, details of the property, and the price paid. The latter was not always accurate. Other types of deed transferring the ownership of property and land include ‘feoffments’ and ‘quitclaims’, both most commonly found in the 16th and 17th centuries, and you may also find evidence of mortgages and settlements. A majority of these deeds are held at local archives with some at TNA.
When a property was conveyed by lease and release, two documents were created. Only one of the records may survive, but where they both do they are usually held in the same bundle. Like many other types of deed, including fines and common recoveries, they surround a fictitious dispute.
Title deeds can give you the names of several generations of the same family. This may be due to simple inheritance from one person to another, or due to the popular three-life leases where the ‘lives’ were named. The latter might name a man, his son and his grandson, with their relationship, ages and occupations noted, although the ‘lives’ weren’t necessarily relations or different generations. One of my ancestral deeds names the vendor’s grandfather who initially bought the property.
The acreage of the land, the names of neighbours and the names of adjacent fields are often given. This information may help you to find the property on a map. The deed will often give your forebear’s occupation. Where this is not given it is sometimes hinted at in the description of the property, for example if it is described as a blacksmith’s shop or a wheelwright’s yard. A previous land owner’s date of death or the date that their will was written may be mentioned. Title deeds often include other historical documentation where it was needed. This can include copies of parish register entries, wills and civil registration certificates.
Until 1925, it was a legal requirement for all property owners to retain the deeds relating to their property. This resulted in property owners passing on large bundles of deeds to each other after a conveyance was completed. After 1925, when the deeds were no longer needed, many people held onto them and some were handed into county record offices. This means that you can often find bundles held in archives all relating to the same property.
Title deeds used to be very large documents. Lawyers were paid by the line, so it was in their interest to write as lengthy a document as possible. This means a lot of the wording is repetitive.
How to get title deeds
Many deeds have yet to be catalogued by archives, so they are often lumped together under a vague heading such as ‘Dorchester title deeds’ and are not searchable by the vendor or purchaser’s name. Arguably the biggest drawback is their low survival rate, because many people disposed of their deeds after the law changed in 1925.
The best way to find title deeds is via a local archive’s catalogue or TNA’s catalogue Discovery, which contains information relating to local archives as well as its own collections. Deeds are not always held in the county archive you’d expect; as well as the fact that county boundaries change over the years, many deeds travelled with previous property owners and were deposited with their new nearest archive. So start your search by inputting your ancestor’s name in Discovery. Note that the phrase ‘title deed’ may not appear in the holding; it may instead refer to the type of deed, such as lease and release or quitclaim.
