Land and home deed documents search, is there a free and easy way?

Question

Sourcing the date of a residential move is not yet obvious to me. Relying on census data provides some direction but that’s only an estimate with a plus or minus ten year uncertainty. Is there an easy and non-subscription (free) way of doing USA real estate transfer deeds searches? If not, what is the most cost effective way? I’m currently working on mid 20th century profiles (1920-1960) and would like accurate residential timelines for the bios.

Thank you.

Comments

Richard, I don't have an answer about 20th century deed searching (except perhaps to check in the actual locale's deed office). But you can look more deeply at the census records to get a sense of when a move happened.

Look at the birth years and places of the children.  Let's say in 1940, you find a family in Detroit, Michigan with six children. The first three children were born in New York between 1926 and 1934; the fourth child was born in Michigan in 1936; that suggests that the family move took place about 1934-1936.

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You can see what familysearch.org has about deeds by looking at their Catalog (found under the Search menu).

Search by Place. You'll then get a long list of different kinds of records which often includes "Land and Property"...

Answer 1

there would be a limited use case for a historic national database like this although for records in our modern era of social security numbers etc. you can  probably get this from a database like lexisnexis public records (not free).

perhaps there are state level property searches, but in my state it's county by county, with some counties having no public online database at all, where you must either go in person or pay the clerk do a search. if local government can make money off a service, they have very little incentive to make their records public.

city directories for the towns you are researching are probably the best way to gather this information. in many cases, those are not digitized, you need to get the book off the shelf in the local library.