“(What do you think, should we add property to the Powerball?)”
A title chain can take you from a modern property straight back into a story most people have never heard.
Between 1805 and 1833, Georgia distributed huge amounts of land by lottery to encourage settlement. (What do you think, should we add property to the Powerball?) Eligible residents put their names into drawings, and over time roughly three-quarters of the state was distributed to about 100,000 people and families for relatively small fees.
Winning the land was only the beginning. Many lottery winners never even saw the property they had been awarded. Some sold their lots to those looking to make a profit, who then sold them to other buyers. Others settled on the land and began building farms and communities.
The lottery also created a system of land districts and lot numbers, (a numbered section of the district), that are still used to locate property today. A modern Georgia property may have been divided and resold many times, but its legal history can still lead back to the original district and lot created during one of these lotteries.
That means a title search can sometimes follow a property back more than 200 years, all the way to the person whose name was drawn for that piece of Georgia. That’s one of the quiet pleasures of title work: seeing how yesterday’s decisions continue to shape today’s property.
At Real Title Services, we’re trained to follow those connections when a search reaches beyond the obvious records.
You never quite know what you’ll find hiding in the title.
Angela Sharp
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