As Mark mentioned, we spent Wednesday afternoon at the county courthouse, finding information about nearby properties.  I learned how to do this when I was buying our own farm, since a title search is essential to make sure you know what you're getting into.  You can either pay a lawyer to look for liens (debts), sold mineral rights, pesky right-of-ways, etc. attached to your potential property, or you can buckle down and do the research yourself.  Even after you own a piece of property, these skills come in handy since you can use the same technique to figure out who your neighbors are, or to find the assessed value and size of any property in the county.

If your county has entered the digital age, you might not have to jump through all of these hoops, but here's what we did.  In case you're curious, the photos are in order (except for the first one), but don't match the written steps they're beside --- a little artistic license.

Step 1: Orient yourself.  If you're looking up information on a property in a rural area, it can be handy to pinpoint the location by flipping back and forth between google maps' aerial photo and plain map features.  Once you zoom in far enough (at least in our region), google maps shows the parcel boundaries on the non-photographic map.  Do this at home before you head to the courthouse, and print out an annotated map to refresh your memory.  (While you're at it, pack your bag with a notebook, pen, camera, and money for copies if you want to make any.  Except for using the copying machine, this project is cost-free.)

Step 2: Find your tax map number.  At the courthouse, your first stop will be the tax assessor's office, where you'll probably find a big map of the county on the wall.  The lines mark off the boundaries of smaller maps, which (in our courthouse at least) are filed in a hanging cabinet.  Pull out the proper map and orient yourself using your prior research.  (In our county, only roads and creeks are shown on these maps, so it can be tough to find a property if you haven't done some homework.)  The tax map number is the number of the map you used followed by the number of the parcel --- for example: 47-90 for the property labeled 90 on the map labeled 47.

Step 3: Find the assessment information for your property.  Filing cabinets beside the maps are divided up by map number, so you can just flip through until you find the sheet that corresponds to the property you're interested in.  In our county, this sheet of paper gives all kinds of fascinating information, including the name and address of the owner(s), the acreage, the assessed value of the property, and information on improvements.  You should also write down the deed information, which will be another two number series (this time a deed book number followed by a page number).

Step 4: Find the most recent deed for the property.  In our courthouse, you have to go downstairs to the records department to look at deeds.  (The folks who work throughout the courthouse are often very friendly and will help you out if you get confused or lost.)  The deed books are in numerical order, so pull out the correct one and flip to the page listed on the tax assessment.  In the deed book, you'll learn when the current owners bought the property, from whom, and for how much.  In some cases, there will be a description (or map) of the boundaries; in others, you will be referred to the previous sale of the property for that information.  The information in the deed trumps the boundaries delineated on the tax map, so if your property is a completely different shape in the two places (like ours is), the deed is more likely to be correct.

Step 5: Read back through the deeds for the last hundred years or so.  A complete title search is only necessary if you're interested in buying a piece of land, or if you're a history buff.  It's pretty easy to follow the land backwards --- each deed will refer to a previous deed book and page --- but can get trickly if land has been split apart or lumped together.  I didn't go into depth with any of the properties we were looking at this week since we're just putting out feelers, but when I bought our farm, I went all the way back and even read the deeds of neighboring properties to get more information about our right-of-way.

Extra credit: While you're there, you might want to flip through the earliest deed books your courthouse has available.  Ours date back to the late 1800s, and the earliest ones are handwritten!

Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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