Reading Between the Lines: Deed Terminology in Historical Research (Part 1)

At a county courthouse records office, a researcher opens a deed book beside a handwritten notebook. Sunlight traces the contours of the pages, janky typewritten texts, legal phrasing, and quiet annotations resting together in shared inquiry. This image suggests how historical land research lives between the lines: where the public record meets personal interpretation, and where place, language, and legacy begin to converge.

You'll find that historical deed terminology, the technical grammar of land and its measurements, its phrasing, its points of beginning, is not neutral. It carries the trace of decisions made long ago and the weight of responsibilities still unfolding. For archaeologists, these records offer more than evidence; they present intergenerational continuity or rupture, reveal associations of historically significant persons with a plot of land; and offer finer resolution of place-specific memory. For ranchers, they are a tangible form of validation and source of pride for multi-generational ranching, working inheritances, and contain vestiges of stories of those that came before them. This post, with a Texas bent, points to a shared task: to interpret these documents not only for their legal clarity, but for their ability to reflect encoded relationships between humans and land over time.

Some loaded Latinisms persist in historic deeds, take the term et ux, meaning “and wife.” It often appears in older deeds where only the husband is named as grantor, followed by “et ux” to indicate his spouse’s inclusion in the transaction (Justia 2025). This shorthand reflects a legal tradition in which women’s identities were subsumed under their husbands,’ a practice that persisted until reforms like the Married Women’s Property Acts began to shift ownership norms. In contrast to et ux is feme sole. Feme sole denotes a woman acting independently of a husband, often appearing in probate-related deeds or property transfers involving widows or unmarried women (Britannica 2024).

What were The Married Women’s Property Acts you ask? They were a series of transformative laws passed across the United States beginning in 1839 that slowly dismantled the legal doctrine of coverture, a system under English common law that rendered married women legally invisible. Under "coverture," a woman’s identity was absorbed into her husband’s upon marriage: she couldn’t own property, sign contracts, earn wages in her own name, or sue or be sued. In essence, she was civilly dead. Interestingly, Texas while still a republic in 1840, passed one of the most expansive acts in the South. It allowed married women to enter contracts, write wills, and even veto the sale of the family homestead, even if they didn’t legally own it (Enstam 2021). This perspective is also reflected in the way that censuses were designed prior to the 1850 U.S. census, where wives and the rest of the household existed as tallies under the male head of household (Bouk 2022:62).

Other Latin phrases encountered in historical deeds include et al (“and others”) are commonly found in indexes or grantor listings when multiple heirs or parties are involved- not simply for multiple authors in academic papers. A deed might list “Billy Bob et al.” as grantors, with the full list of names buried in the body of the document. Lis pendens, meaning “suit pending,” is typically recorded at the county clerk’s office to signal that a property is subject to litigation such as squabbling between heirs or because inaccurate land measurements created the illusion there was more land to sell than the reality. One such way to resolve Lis pendens situation on a deed is to "quiet the title" to clear up who really owned the title.

Because it was common for deals to be made between parties before the paperwork resolved/filed or before full ownership was acquired in the first place, you might see a reference to estoppel, appears in deeds or affidavits to prevent a party from contradicting prior claims, especially relevant in disputes over mineral rights or boundary lines. An estoppel by deed (e.g., warranty deed, or quitclaim deeds) is most often invoked when someone transfers property they don’t yet own, but later acquire, then title automatically passes to the grantee without the grantee worrying about "takebacksies" from the grantor later. An estoppel affidavit ensures a property transaction is final, it prevents a later dispute to a term of agreement, like saying later an agreement was made under coercion or undervaluation.

Also sometimes opaque seeming are even the names of the deed types themselves. Deed types could include general warranty, special warranty, quitclaim, timber, or royalty deeds, each carry distinct implications. A general warranty deed offers full title assurance of ownership, while a quitclaim deed conveys only the interest the grantor may have, without guarantees. Timber and royalty deeds carve out specific resource rights, often appearing in transactions tied to extractive industries. Think of trust deeds as temporary custodianship of title, while warranty deeds are permanent transfers and bond for deeds as installment-based ownership where the buyer doesn't get title until the end. For more, see the below table (LegalClarity 2022; ATG Title 2023; LawDistrict 2023).

Deed Type	Core Function	Rights Conveyed	Grantee Risk Profile	Common Use
Trust Deed	Secures a loan	Title held by trustee until debt is paid	Moderate (non-judicial foreclosure risk)	Real estate financing; Popular after Mid-1800s in Texas and other Western states as an expedited foreclosure mechanism
Bond for Deed	Seller-financed sale	Equitable interest until full payment	High (title remains with seller)	Alternatives to mortgages, heir property resolution or informal family transfers; Popular since the early 1900s for rural land sales, informal housing arrangements, low-income buyers and minority communities due to economic exclusion or credit scarcity
General Warranty Deed	Full title transfer	All rights with strongest guarantees	Low (grantor liable for all title defects)	Traditional property sales
Special Warranty Deed	Title transfer with limited guarantees	Rights during grantor's ownership only	Moderate (limits the seller's legal exposure by assuring the title was clear only during the time they owned the property)	Commercial, foreclosures, developer sales of newly built homes, or estate sales; Popular from the 1900s to present in typical bank-owned and commercial transactions where sellers limit liability
Quitclaim Deed	Releases interest with no guarantees	Whatever interest grantor holds (if any)	High (transfers property "as is," which could include liens, encumbrances, or competing claims without recourse to grantee)	Family transfers, title corrections; Popular since the 1800s to present in simple family transfers, divorce settlements, and informal property resolutions
Timber Deed	Transfer rights to harvest timber	Specific natural resource rights	Variable (depends on terms)	Resource extraction agreements; Popular in late 1800s to early 1900s/Depression era, and in tree farm contexts today
Royalty Deed	Transfers right to receive royalties	Non-participating interest in production	High (no control over operations)	Oil, gas, or mineral interests; Popular in early 1900s oil booms, post-WWII estate planning and mineral leasing strategies, and still active in shale regions with complicated fractional interests traded or bundled in trusts
Bargain and Sale Deed	Transfers ownership with implied ownership claim	Implied right to convey, but no title warranties	Moderate to High (may inherit encumbrances or defects)	Real Estate Owned property sales (owned by a lender like a bank of government agency), estate transfers, government auctions; Popular in Colonial American to the early 1900s, in colonial land transfers and still used by municipalities and banks
Sheriff's Deed	Transfers property after judicial foreclosure sale	Title from foreclosure often "as is"	High (minimal warranties; possible liens or redemption rights)	Judicial foreclosure auctions; tax liens sales; Popular since the 1800s, especially post-Civil War and often during economic downturns (Sharecropper era, Great Depression, 1980s farm crisis)

Some other common terms you'll see in deeds are "to-wit" and "joined pro forma." To-wit means "namely..." or pivots the reader from the general legal language to precise factual content to follow (LegalClarity 2022). Joined pro forma, means "as a matter of form" and refers to a spouse signing a deed or deed of trust acknowledge or consent to the transactions. This may be used to satisfy a homestead protection under the Texas constitution, or simply because the spouse doesn't hold title but their homestead rights require consent. Alternatively, it could be because the property is separate property acquired before marriage, but occupied as a homestead. It might also be used because their signature was needed to perfect a lien or release community/homestead claims (First National Title Insurance Company 2025; Texas National Title 2025).

Beyond language, the measurements used in Texas land records reflect a layered history of colonial systems and surveying practices. The vara (vrs), a Spanish unit meaning “rod” or “pole,” was standardized in Texas at 33⅓ inches (Hone 1997:17,63). It originated from the Vara de Burgos, a 16th-century Spanish standard developed by foresters in northern Spain due to different provinces in the Middle Ages using so many different units of measure (Reyes-Martinez 2019). After the conquest of the Americas, the vara became the dominant unit in Spanish land grants, later adopted by Anglo surveyors in Stephen F. Austin’s colony using 10-vara chains.

Another delightfully archaic unit that pops until in historical land surveys and deeds is the pole, not to be confused with the vara which can mean pole, was a unit equal to 16.5 ft, or 5.5 yards, or 1/4th of a surveyor's chain. A commonly used unit among early American and British surveying. This unit is a smaller subset of the chain, four poles make a chain, and ten square chains (e.g., 160 square poles) equals one acre (Hone 1997:63).

A chain in surveying typically refers to Gunter’s chain, 66 feet long and divided into 100 links. In Texas, however, surveyors adapted this to a 10-vara chain, aligning with Spanish units while accommodating Anglo-American measurement systems (Hone 1997:63). The league, another Spanish unit, was used to define large land grants. One square league equals 25 labors or approximately 4,428 acres (Hone 1997:63). A labor, meanwhile, is 1,000,000 square varas, about 177.1 acres, and was considered the amount of land a family could reasonably work.

In the cadence of metes and bounds, the landscape itself often becomes the ledger. Trees mark corners not just for their fixed presence, but for their longevity across generations of deeds. A boundary might begin (“beg.”) at a post oak (PO), then run to a sweet gum (SG) near the old fence line, or extend to a black jack (BJ) guarding the west boundary line (“WBL”) of a neighboring tract. These abbreviations, SG, BJ, BO (black oak), RO (red oak), Hick (hickory), and others are more than shorthand- they are ecological signatures in legal form. Rock piles, stumps, blazed trunks, and aging wire fences complement this arboreal lexicon, offering grounded reference where formal surveying instruments may have once been absent or inaccessible. To read these markers is to read a living record, stitched across deeds that locate themselves not only in abstract angles, but in remembered trees, shared edges, and a window into historic ecosystems (Gordon and DeCant 2001).

In essence, land granting systems and languages were shaped during different periods under different regimes, which left their fingerprints on the pattern and location of land grants, not just the language left on the deeds. During Spanish colonial rule, Texas land grants were tools of both frontier control and spiritual expansion. The Spanish crown offered tracts of land to settlers, soldiers, and missionaries, hoping to stabilize the northern frontier and convert Indigenous populations to Christianity. So these concentrated around religious and military outposts, town lots, and grazing lands. These early grants were often vaguely defined, tied to rivers, arroyos, or the edge of known pastureland. A characteristic of this period's grant shapes was its long, narrow tracts called porciones meant to ensure water access. Surveying instruments were rare, so natural features and oral testimony often determined boundaries. Land was as much spiritual charge as civic possession, and grants could be revoked if obligations weren’t met. The land was conveyed by provincial governments or royal commissioners, first in an informal way and later formalized through juridical possession.

In the Mexican era, beginning with independence from Spain in 1821, Texas became a canvas for organized colonization. The 1824 Colonization Law and subsequent regional laws encouraged the migration of foreign settlers under specific conditions: allegiance to Mexico, Catholic faith, and commitment to agricultural development. Empresario contracts, such as those led by Stephen F. Austin, Green DeWitt, and others, enabled the large-scale settlement of Anglo-Americans, each family receiving land measured in leagues (particularly for grazing) and labors (particularly for farming). Boundaries remained naturalistic, but documentation grew more structured, setting the stage for conflict between traditional practices and emerging Anglo-American legal norms. Land grants in this period were often recorded locally, leading to decentralized archives (FamilySearch Wiki 2025).

Following Texas’s independence in 1836, the Republic formalized its own land distribution systems. Veterans of the revolution were awarded bounty grants or donation grants; heads of households received headright certificates; and citizens were incentivized to claim frontier lands. The size of the headright was shaped by arrival dates, size of household (which counted slaves), and marital status (Hone 1997; FamilySearch 2025). These headrights were divided into classes, class 1 for residents prior to March 2, 1836, and class 2-4 for immigrants arriving between 1836 and 1842. Those receiving first-class headrights were granted one league and one labor (Hone 1997; FamilySearch 2025). These grants served both to populate the new nation and to cement its territorial claims against Mexico and Native nations. The Republic’s General Land Office began collecting surveys, affidavits, and maps to support property rights, but inconsistencies abounded. Land speculation boomed, overlapping claims proliferated, and the boundary language carried both local memory and legal ambiguity.

The Post-1845 (State of Texas) period to the present left further land grant imprints on the land from rewards for Confederate service in the Civil War and their widows (via scrip grants), and settlers who squatted on land long enough to obtain preemption grants (Aldon and Long 2016).The mechanisms for this were the 1881 Confederate Soldier's Bill, which granted 1,280-acre certificates to wounded veterans, their widows, or servants, provided they met eligibility requirements (e.g., property value under $1,000); the Preemption Act of 1845, allowing settlers to purchase up to 320 acres; and the Homestead Act of 1854 which reduced this to 160 acres (Guerra 1995).

There also were education and infrastructure land grants in this period. When Texas joined the United States in 1845, it retained control of its public lands, an unusual privilege compared to other states. During statehood, land grants became mechanisms for funding public institutions. The Permanent School Fund was established in 1854, endowed with land rather than cash, shaping a landscape where education was literally staked to the soil (Texas Permanent School Fund Corporation 2025). Railroad companies too received land grant incentives, 16 sections (10,240 acres) per mile of track laid, with matching surveys for the school fund (Griffin 2020). Railroad Companies and settlers continued to receive incentives, and the surveying process grew more standardized, although many grant-era descriptions, full of water oaks, rock piles, and fence remnants, remained the legal foundation.

Later periods saw the shift from vernacular boundary-making to modern cadastral systems. Bearings and distances replaced tree initials and local lore. Legal disputes often arose when original markers (like a "BO at WBL" or “beg. at SG near old wagon trail”) had vanished or were inconsistently recorded. Reconciling these older markers with grid-based maps required both technical ingenuity and historical fluency. What survived was a layered documentary terrain: ecological, narrative, and jurisdictional, requiring researchers to trace not only property, but the evolving relationship between land, law, and cultural memory.

References

ATG Title. “Types of Property Deeds and What They Mean.” ATG Title, 2023. https://atgtitle.com/types-of-property-deeds-and-what-they-mean-2/

Dan Bouk, Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them (New York: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022),

Elizabeth York Enstam, “Women and the Law,” Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, last modified March 31, 2021, accessed July 27, 2025, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/women-and-the-law.

“Feme Sole,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed July 27, 2025, https://www.britannica.com/topic/feme-sole.

First National Title Insurance Company. “Title Insurance.” Accessed July 27, 2025. https://fnti.com/title-insurance.

Griffin, Roger A. “Land Grants for Internal Improvements.” Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association. Last modified August 7, 2020. Accessed July 27, 2025. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/land-grants-for-internal-improvements.

Guerra, Manuel. “Land Scrip.” Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association. Last modified December 1, 1995. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/land-scrip.

Justia Legal Dictionary, “Et ux Definition, Meaning & Usage,” accessed July 27, 2025, https://dictionary.justia.com/et-ux.

Lang, Aldon S., and Christopher Long. “Land Grants.” Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association. Last modified January 23, 2016. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/land-grants.

LegalClarity. “What Types of Deeds Are Valid to Transfer Property?” LegalClarity, 2022. https://legalclarity.org/what-types-of-deeds-are-valid-to-transfer-property/

LawDistrict. “Types of Deeds.” LawDistrict, 2023. https://www.lawdistrict.com/articles/types-of-deeds

“Texas Land and Property,” FamilySearch Wiki, last modified July 27, 2025, https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Texas_Land_and_Property.

Texas National Title. “Title Insurance Terms.” Accessed July 27, 2025. https://www.texasnationaltitle.com/title-insurance-terms.

Texas Permanent School Fund Corporation. “Our History.” Texas Permanent School Fund Corporation. Accessed July 27, 2025. https://texaspsf.org/our-history.

Wade Hone, Land and Property Research in the United States (Salt Lake City: Ancestry, 1997), 17,63.

Whitney, Gordon G., and Joseph P. DeCant. “Government Land Office Survey and Other Early Land Survey.” In The Historical Ecology Handbook: A Restorationist’s Guide to Reference Ecosystems, edited by Dave Egan and Evelyn A. Howell, 147–172. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001.