Land Record Research
The first step in performing a property boundary survey is land record research. In the State of Connecticut, records are housed at the municipal level, in the town halls. Before conducting fieldwork, surveyors must review relevant deeds, maps, and other documents. At a minimum, surveyors in CT need to review the deed for the property being surveyed as well as the deeds for the properties that abut it (i.e. touch it). The deed research involves looking not only at the current deeds of record, but also a “chain of title”. In examining the “chain”, the surveyor looks for the original description of the property of interest. Often, the original description refers to a subdivision of a larger piece of land. Other times, multiple tracts of land are merged to create the property.
Land Record Maps
Land record maps are found in the same place as deeds, in the Town Clerk’s land record vault. The vault contains thousands (if not millions) of documents, including meeting, birth, and election records in addition to survey maps. Fortunately, the Clerks keep careful indexes that allow an interested party to quickly navigate to a particular map. In fact, there are usually at least two index books, one sorted by owner name and the other by street name. More and more, we are finding that both map and deed indexes are searchable by computer within the Town Clerk’s office, with many also being published online in the public domain.
Contact Franklin Surveys today for a quote on your boundary survey.
