What to do with old 18th Century deeds?

[sharonmx5]

Personally, I would keep them! (Somewhere safe, of course)

When we sold my Mother's property six years ago, I collected the deeds of her house from safekeeping expecting the solicitor acting for me would ask for them so they could be passed to the new owner or mortgage lender. Apparently this no longer happens, the relevant documents are held electronically, so paper documents no longer required. (Must admit I am confused as to how this can be, since our  documents had been locked away for 30 years. Maybe there have always been duplicates at the land registry?)

How exciting to have such old documents in your possession. Mine only go back a few years in comparison!

FS

When the property went through first registration at the Land Registry the most relevant documents would have been sent to the Land Registry.  They would have probably kept a copy of the document that shows the 'root' of the title, and typed out a copy of any relevant restrictive covenants etc from the documents and then returned them all to the solicitor for the buyer or any mortgagor to keep.  From the information they have extracted they produce their one title document which can be downloaded from them for a fee.  Everything relevant to the title of the property is there so the original deeds are no longer required.

[Jolee]

The deeds to my house are on permanent loan to the history dept of the local library in their archives

[jbml]

Paper deeds ARE still necessary if the title is still unregistered ... but hardly any unregistered titles remain. The whole of the country has been subject to compulsory registration since the early 1990s, so for land to be unregistered it needs not to have been subject to a conveyance on sale for at least quarter of a century now (and possibly much longer if it is in certain parts of the country). That is an absolute minimum condition.

When I trained as a solicitor in the early 1990s there was still a lot of unregistered land about, and I had to learn to work from deeds such as you have there, Suffolkboy. If you would like, I should be very happy to sit down with you and go through what you have, produce a proper Abstract of Title for you (if there isn't one there already) and help you to decipher the more tricky ones.