The Case of the Missing Deeds

Researchers can get frustrated when they know an ancestor owns land, but cannot find a deed to show when then land was sold. Sometimes the deed simply was not filed, and you’re out of luck. But there are other occasions when tracking transactions gets more difficult—the land was sold to satisfy a debt, to satisfy delinquent taxes, or partitioned among heirs. The way that these sales are handled complicates the searcher’s life. However, there are some avenues for trying to eliminate those dead ends.
When a person’s land is sold to satisfy a private debt, the sale is the result of a suit in which a court issues an order in favor of the plaintiff. The successful plaintiff wins the right to sell property to raise money to pay off the debt. (Let’s not get too technical, lawyers.) The county commissioners become the party that sells the land held by the debtor. This is the aspect that creates complications in tracking down the deed. Because commissioners are the grantors, when the deed is indexed, it’s indexed under the name of one of the commissioners, not the property owner’s. If the commissioners were John Smith, Frank Jones, and Fred Doe, the sale might be indexed under “Smith, John.” If you don’t know who purchased the land, you’re chances of finding this sale are considerably lessened.
One way to counter this is to find the property on a county plat map and trace the property’s history backward from the owner showed on the map. Both the 1876 and 1900 maps hang on the wall of the Jefferson County-Madison Public Library and the Jefferson County Historical Society has copies of the 1876 map for sale. The John Paul Chapter of the DAR also included township plat maps with the 1941 publication of Jefferson County cemetery transcriptions. These maps appear to date from the 1920s, although I have not seen them published in a single map. Finding commissioners’ deeds is also a bit convoluted. In the early part of the 1800s, they were filed in the regular deed books. But in the middle of century, they began to be filed in separate commissioners’ deed books. Both sets of records are found in the office of the County Recorder.
Not so for tax title sales—the deeds for these are found in the County Auditor’s office. If you your ancestor fails to pay taxes, this is where the records settled. Where commissioners deeds recite the court case, and the follow the usual format for warranty deeds, tax deeds are not particularly extensive. They show the name of the person who owned the land, and for what period they owed taxes, and the name of the purchaser, along with the legal land description. They omit such items as names of neighboring land owners, landmarks, and witnesses.
Partitions of estates can also cause problems. We’re talking both about formal partitions, in which the land is sold by court order in order to divide the proceeds for distribution, and informal arrangements, in which the family members do it themselves. The grantor may be a brother-in-law or sibling, and the sale is indexed under this person’s name, sometimes with the tag “et al.”--but not always. This is one of those occasions when it is useful to know the names of as many of an ancestor’s relatives (especially brothers and sisters) as possible.
Delays in recording deeds can also make the researcher’s life harder. Deeds are entered into the books not when they are written, but when they are presented for recording and recording can take place years after a sale. In some cases, a property owner might wait until he was ready to sell his land before recording the deed. Suppose John Smith buys a piece of property in 1824, but waits to record it until 1830 when he sells the land to Jim Jones. Jones immediately records his deed and the end result is that the two deeds are entered one after another in the 1830 deed book. (It always pays to flip forward a few pages and backward a few pages when looking for deeds.) In some cases the deeds may be recorded until after the death of the owner, in order to make it possible for the heirs to sell the property. Remember, in those days, going into town was not routine for farmers in the outlying townships. Even in the 1920s, my father’s family often visited Madison once a year.
Also, it may take decades for all of the heirs to sell their interests. For instance, after William Hankins died in 1864, all of his heirs (children and grandchildren) executed deeds selling their interest in his forty acres to William Wilkins, who had married Hankins’ youngest daughter. While most deeds were filed in 1864, the final transfer by one granddaughter did not occur until 1883. In another instance in this same family, the deed for the land patented by Aaron Hankins in 1838 was not filed with the recorded until 1887, after Hankins either died, or perhaps became incapacitated with age.
An extreme case involves Buchanan family records. Wilson Buchanan died in 1851 in Ripley County. But he owned land in Jefferson that was purchased by his son George W. Buchanan (1828-1911). The deeds were not recorded until 1912, when George’s estate had been probated, and included a map showing the distribution of Wilson’s Jefferson County holdings to his heirs in the 1850s.

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