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By Nashville Indiana Title Company
The Prior Deed We Pull Before Anyone Types a New One Before we draft a single line of your new deed, we go find the last one. The deed that put the curr...
Before we draft a single line of your new deed, we go find the last one. The deed that put the current owner on title. It might be from 2019, or it might be handwritten and recorded in a book at the Brown County Recorder's office back when the county was still measuring in rods and poles. Either way, we pull it first. Every time. Because the new deed is only as good as the one before it, and the words we type on yours mostly come from the words already on record.
That's the part people don't expect. A deed isn't written fresh from scratch like an email. It's built off the last valid transfer, carried forward, corrected where it needs correcting, and matched against what the title search actually found. So the prior deed isn't a footnote. It's the blueprint.
The legal description... the part of the deed that actually defines your property, not just the street address... comes off the prior deed. If the prior deed describes forty acres "beginning at a stone at the northwest corner, thence south along the old fence line," that language usually rides forward into yours, sometimes word for word. We don't rewrite that on a hunch. We copy what's on record and confirm it holds up.
Here's why that matters in Brown County specifically. A lot of our property was described decades ago, off surveys that referenced creek beds, tree lines, and stones instead of the clean lot-and-block descriptions you get in an Indianapolis subdivision. Salt Creek shifts. A fence gets rebuilt ten feet over. When we pull the prior deed and set it next to the survey and the search, that's where we catch a description that no longer matches the ground. Better to see it before we type the new deed than after you own it.
We also read the prior deed for how the current owners took title. Did a married couple take it as tenants by the entirety? Did one person inherit it and never record the transfer? Is there a life estate buried in there that lets someone live on the property until they pass? All of that lives in the prior deed, and all of it changes who has to sign to give you clean title. You can't draft a correct new deed until you know exactly what the old one created.
When we open a prior deed, a few things get our attention right away.
The names have to line up. The seller signing your closing paperwork needs to be the same person who received title in the prior deed, spelled the same way. People get married, get divorced, drop a middle name, start going by a nickname. When "Robert J. Miller" on the old deed shows up as "Bob Miller" on the purchase agreement, that's not a problem, it's just a gap we bridge before closing so the chain reads clean.
The type of deed tells us what we inherited. A warranty deed carries strong promises about clear title. A quitclaim deed transfers only whatever the grantor happened to have, with no promises at all. When the prior deed is a quitclaim... common when property moved between family members or after a death... we look harder at everything around it, because a quitclaim doesn't guarantee the title was clean when it changed hands.
We check that the prior deed was actually recorded, and recorded correctly. An unrecorded deed sitting in a drawer somewhere doesn't officially transfer anything in Indiana. The recording at the Brown County Recorder's office is what makes ownership public and enforceable. If the chain of ownership recorded on the property has a break in it, we find it here, at the prior deed, not on closing day.
Think about buying a wooded cabin near the state park where the property came down through a family. Someone's grandmother owned it. She passed, and the family kept using it for summers, but nobody ever formally moved the property into the next generation's names on record. On paper, grandmother still owns it.
If we drafted your new deed off the purchase agreement without pulling the prior deed, we'd be transferring property from people who don't yet legally hold title. That deed wouldn't do what everyone at the table thinks it does. Pulling the prior deed first is exactly how we catch that the estate needs to be handled before the sale can close, so the transfer to you actually sticks. Nobody enjoys hearing there's a step in the middle. But finding it early beats finding it the day someone tries to refinance or sell three years from now and discovers the title never really moved.
This kind of thing isn't rare out here. Property near Bean Blossom, Gnaw Bone, and the ridges around Nashville has been in families a long time. Rural acreage with wells, shared drives, and old handshake arrangements shows up in the prior deed more than you'd guess. That history is exactly why we read it closely.
Preparing your deed is one of the last things we do before closing, but pulling the prior deed is one of the first. The order is on purpose. The search tells us who and what. The prior deed tells us how the property was described and conveyed. The survey, when there is one, tells us what's actually on the ground. Your new deed only gets drafted after those three agree, or after we've resolved wherever they don't.
So when you sign at our office on the square this summer, the document in front of you didn't start with a template and your name dropped in. It started with us walking your property's paper trail backward, one deed at a time, until we hit solid ground. Then we built forward from there. That's the quiet work behind a clean transfer, and it's why we pull the old deed before anyone types a new one.