[TheForge] OT: Screwed up deeds...

[dann at wctatel.net]

Andy,

The new GPS  software that surveyors use  will continue to find "messed
up" heritage surveys.  I would guess that  "Meets and Bounds" legal
descriptions would be predominate kind of survey boundaries in WV.

Traditionally when a surveyor did his work, he buried a metal monument in
the ground at specific locations, and then tied those with multiple
monuments together, and specific survey measurements, so that they could
not easily be messed with. If your land was flat, like my part of Iowa,
people here  can simply use a metal detector and a long tape measure to 
resolve a lot of problems with a handshake.

However, I remember when a major portion of a local city was found to be
mis-surveyed, so that parts one person's home & garage was actually on the
neighbors land, and so on down the street: block after block.


Tools to try out for free,  before spending big dollars on a new survey:

There will be a County USDA office for Farm Service Agency (FSA) that will
have, scale aerial photos of your farm / rural site, and may have fields
delineated on it. They have a computer program that can give you a very
good estimate of acreage, but that is rated "good" only for federal
program purposes. The land owner or farm operator gets their copy for
free.
http://offices.sc.egov.usda.gov/locator/app?state=wv&agency=fsa

At the County Court House, the County Auditor ( at least in Iowa ) keeps a
different set of giant (larger than coffee table) books with large scale
photos with pen and ink declinations / plots of ownership tracts. Using
old school onion skin paper, we used to  trace out the tracts that we
needed.

Fixing the problem ?  Is is it really worth fixing, and at what price is 
it worth fixing ?
A complex survey could cost some real dollars.  Worse, if your new
surveyor conflicts with your neighbor's survey, it could fall on a court
of law to resolve it.

In Iowa, and many States, if the owner of the land has had uncontested use
of the land, without paying rent for a 10 year period,( something like
squatter's rights)  they can file an affidavit of possession, and even if
the title was wrong, if the affidavit is not contested / not over turned 
in court, that affidavit will gain the ownership weight of a land deed.

Dann


> So, I have this neat plotting software.  I plot the deed calls and
> discover there are errors.  Worse yet, I plot one of the neighbor's deed
> and the calls calculate her 5 acre parcel at 10.32 acres.  That is not a
> mildly screwed up deed but a fairly monumental case.  The common
> boundaries between us have notably wide variances in azimuth angles and
> lengths.  Azimuths are off by more than 5* and one common border is
> called a good 200 feet shorter on the neighbor's deed, yet I know mine
> are right because I went and measured everything.  And one of the
> corners plots only about 100' from our house, well above one of our
> fence lines and hundreds of feet past the outer fence line.
>
> My question is this: how does one get a deed corrected and how does one
> get one's neighbor to correct theirs as well?  I am in no humor for
> having problems with the deed, especially if time comes to sell.
> Granted most people probably do not examine the deed closely, but if one
> does I would think they would run for the hills in such a case as this.
>
> On other fronts, that damned fox came up on the back porch and ate the
> setting hen.  Time to kill the fox.  Luckily for me I have access to an
> AR in 300 Whisper with a silencer and an IR gunsight.  Little miss fox
> will be eating lead for her last meal.  My wife is going to be very
> upset when she finds her favorite hen is gone.
>
> Anyhow, thanks for any information you may have.
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