In this installment of our sources series, we examine that most essential of property records, the deed.
When the Puritans arrived in Massachusetts, they brought with them a reverence for written legal documents and private property, a set of values that has lasted for nearly four centuries and given Massachusetts one of the most extensive archives of land ownership in the world. They made copies of these records in books. In 1639, Middlesex County started at Book #1; we are now at Book #77,420. Every single one of these records is now online.
To begin tracing your property’s history, you need only find the current deed. If you can’t find it, look up your house on the Melrose assessor’s database, here: http://melrose.
Now that you have the book and page number, you can find the complete text of the deed at the Middlesex South Registry of Deeds, here: https://www.masslandrecords.
The Registry’s website only goes back to the year 1900, but not to worry, the older records are also online. The genealogy website of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has scanned in all of the records from the beginning until 1900, here: https://www.familysearch.org/
Using deeds, you can establish the complete ownership history of the parcel of land on which you reside since the beginning of English colonization—but it is important to recognize what deeds will not tell you. Most importantly, they will likely not tell you the exact date when your house was built. Their ultimate function is to record land ownership; the buildings on the land are incidental. That said, you can usually tell under whose ownership the house was built. If you find a deed where the property was sold for $300, and five years later it was sold for $4000, the construction of a major capital improvement was undoubtedly the reason.
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