You Can’t Get There from Here… or Where has Deed Research Gone? „ Greg Crites, PLS The Oregon Surveyor | Vol. 38, No. 5 8 DEED RESEARTCEHXT A critical part of the business of land surveying (in Oregon at least) involves research. Of course, there’s the office of the County Surveyor, local Public Works departments, ODOT and other public agencies—both local and national—for researching survey/public records, but as most of you know, that’s only part of the process involved in resolving the boundaries of a parcel of land. Our job pretty much starts with a deed. A typical scenario can be found in any office of a surveying sole proprietorship. It starts once you hear the ringtone on your phone or a notification pops up in your email system that someone is seeking your services for a land survey. The initial conversation revolves around factfinding. “Do you have a copy of your tax statement? Can you read me the assessor’s parcel number? Street address?” I’m sure you can recall all the possible permutations of how you get to the point of determining where their property lies so you can begin the process of researching records. Back when I started in this business, researching deed records was a simple process. Once I gained the trust of the Assessor (if you know me at all, don’t bother to ask how I did that), which was, of course, absolutely necessary to insure I wasn’t someone intent on burning the courthouse down, then my work pretty much involved going into the basement of the county courthouse, gaining access to the vault where all the old deed books were stored and thumbing through the pages until you found what you were looking for. If you wanted a copy of the instrument, you carefully broke the old ledger apart, took the required original documents up to the clerk’s desk and requested to make copies. (Yes, remember the term “mimeograph?”) If you were faced with a particularly complicated deed, or there were elements of the description that left a hint of some ambiguity, then you would need to dig deeper. Abstracting title (or chaining, though I don’t think either term is used much anymore) involved plowing through the grantor/grantee or grantee/grantor indices to track down predecessors in title to the current owner. If you ever looked through these old books and labored through the differences in handwriting styles of the various scriveners, then you understand how difficult this process was, how time consuming it could be, and how easy it was to overlook some branch of the conveyancing trail that lead you to the source of a scrivener’s error or omission. Explaining to an anxious client about why your research took so long or was so complicated always seemed to draw a blank stare. To a surveyor however, this was where the hunt began, where the understanding of the game gained clarity and where the pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place. This likely seems abstract to anyone other than a land surveyor, but hey, one of those “ah ha” moments that come with finally figuring out what happened can be one of the most gratifying feelings of your career. For me, a complicated deed record was something akin to catching the scent of a bull elk in the rut (I used to be a bow hunter, and that’s all you need to know) while traipsing through the woods in an area where you knew there should be elk but you just hadn’t crossed their trail as yet. The hair on the back of your neck stands up, your senses become instantly more acute and your normally suppressed hunter instincts surface. Sadly, it seems that this hunt for information has been supplanted by someone who you very likely have never met and have no idea of their qualifications. This then is where my story really begins. Lately, I’ve been working on a transmission line project spanning a distance of slightly more than 80 miles. The planned route crosses more than 150 parcels. A few are concentrated into large tracts owned by industrial forestry companies, but the bulk is small landowners, just like me. A project of this magnitude relies on a title insurance company to prepare preliminary title reports on every parcel that may be impacted by this line. It’s not hard to imagine how completely unrealistic (or cost effective for that matter) it is to think that anyone has the budget to turn a surveyor loose to develop title abstracts on every parcel by researching the deed record. Instead, a project of this size requires reliance on title reports prepared by a title company. Those reports generally consist of an abstract of the descriptive words of conveyance (commonly referred to as the deed), some reporting on the status of the tax account and the ever present “Schedule B.” If the title company has done an “adequate” job, the abstract should regurgitate the descriptive words of conveyance from the recorded deed verbatim (though I fail to see why that is necessary, as simply citing the recorded instrument and including a legible copy of it in the supporting documentation should suffice). The Schedule B should
PLSO Issue 5 2015 September October
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