Relinquishment of Dower right?
singhals
I have been told for 3 decades now that in the Mid-Atlantic area, a
man could not sell land without his wife's formal consent and
relinquishment of her dower-right. This Relinquishment has provided
the given name of any number of women who would be otherwise
unknown.
Cruising through deeds in Maryland, looking for clues to the
identity of an unknown wife, in the early to mid 1700s, I'm finding
deeds wherein the spouse of the grantors did NOT formally relinquish
her Dower/Jointure rights; I find a few where the Party of the First
Part is "John Dough and Jane his wife" but in most of them that
phrase is missing and there is no relinquishment of dower right.
Normally, one would posit that she had died prior to the date of the
deeds -- even if that suggest an enormous number of widowers in the
county.
Unfortunately, in one case, I have a deposition a woman made dated
_later_ than deeds in which she is not mentioned. That pretty much
negates the rumors of her death. And if ONE of the ladies is
living, it's not reasonable to assume none of the others are.
Can anyone suggest a reason formal relinquishment wasn't recorded?
Cheryl
singhals <sing...@erols.com>
Gene Y.
> Can anyone suggest a reason formal relinquishment wasn't recorded?
>
----Quote---
Dower rights are the rights that a non owner spouse has in the real
property of his or her spouse. It was originally set up when the husband
was the only real property owner. It was designed to allow the non-owner
wife to make sure that if her husband sold their home without her
permission she would still have some protection in the value of the real
property, so that if the husband later died, she could claim the one
third of the value of her right to live in the home or the value of
income produced by any farm, rental or other real property that he owned
for the rest of her life. Now dower rights apply to both husband and
wife and act more as veto power on the sale of any real property owned
by the other spouse.
*****************Emphasis Added*******************************
Some people will insist on an agreement before the marriage that
requires that the spouse-to-be give up his or her future dower rights.
**************************************************************
http://www.estatefacts.com/what_are_dower_rights.htm
---End Quote---
Possibly the dower rights were given up prior to the marriage,
nullifying the need to have a relinquishment.
One possibility.
--
Gene Y.
"Gene Y." <n2...@cfl.rr.com>
JYoun...@aol.com
> I have been told for 3 decades now that in the Mid-Atlantic area, a
> man could not sell land without his wife's formal consent and
> relinquishment of her dower-right. This Relinquishment has provided
> the given name of any number of women who would be otherwise
> unknown.
>
> Cruising through deeds in Maryland, looking for clues to the
> identity of an unknown wife, in the early to mid 1700s, I'm finding
> deeds wherein the spouse of the grantors did NOT formally relinquish
> her Dower/Jointure rights; I find a few where the Party of the First
> Part is "John Dough and Jane his wife" but in most of them that
> phrase is missing and there is no relinquishment of dower right.
>
I can't speak for Maryland, but in New Jersey the wife did most
definitely have to relinquish dower rights for her husband to sell
property. There is always a separate page where she signs without
her husband being present (to prove she isn't being coerced).
I DID see one case where the wife refused to consent to the sale but
that was also documented--the land was still sold but with an
encumbrance, and the husband sweetened the pot a bit by adding some
additional land to the sale.
Joan
Huntersglenn
I haven't looked at Maryland deeds, but I've seen a lot of deeds in
North Carolina where the relinquishment is not mentioned. However,
going to the court records, I have found the relinquishment
mentioned there when the court okays the deed in question. You
might be running into the same thing in Maryland. I haven't really
noticed if this is following any particular trend, or happening at
specific times - I think it might be more that the person in the
clerk's office who was writing the deed in the books either didn't
want to bother with the relinquishment or forgot about it and then
didn't have room to get it into the deed book. I've also seen
instances where the relinquishment (and the examination of the wife
to make sure that she's doing this of her own free will) is several
pages later in the deed book, and not mentioned in the index for the
deed book since it's not a deed of any kind.
Hope that helps,
Cathy
Huntersglenn <hunter...@cox.net>
Ukes
Joan - The vast majority of my research has been in NJ too
(Gloucester County / West Jersey) and I've seen very few deeds from
before 1785 or so to which the grantor's wife was a party. I looked
at "Colonial Conveyances" (which is an index of the West Jersey &
East Jersey "Secretary of State" deeds from between 1664 & 1794 (if
you want a copy, e-mail me)), and I'd estimate that wives were
parties to only about 15% of deeds from this period. Now some of
these deeds were given by men who weren't married, but most of them
undoubtedly were married, but their wives never formally
relinquished their dower. (NJ enacted a law in Feb.. 1727/8 that
specified how a wife her dower rights, but that law was disallowed
by London in 1731. NJ enacted another law regulating the
relinquishment of dower in 1743 that was not disallowed).
In the late 1700's, deeds with both the husband and the wife as
grantors (and the resulting private examination of the wife) became
much more common, but still not something that was always done. I
have an ancestor who was the grantor on about 10 deeds between 1790
& 1808, and his wife was a party to about half of them. In 1808 he
gave a deed without his wife as a party in which he conveyed all of
the property he owned to a buyer. In 1810, his wife relinquished
her dower in that same property to the same buyer.
To take a stab at Cheryl's question, my guess is that dower was
often not released when land was deeded for a couple of reasons:
1. Often the deeds were from one family member to another, and there
wasn't much concern that the wife would later assert a dower right
against her relative (who could, very well, be her son who was
supporting her), especially if the grantee of the deed did not
expect to sell the property anytime soon.
2. Dower wasn't much of a concern to non-relative land buyers
because women very infrequently asserted their dower rights in those
days. In the couple of cases that I've seen where a husband sold
his land without his wife on the deed and the wife released her
dower a year or two later, I suspect that the purchaser of the
property was either trying to sell the property or mortgage it, and
there was some concern about a cloud on the title because the dower
hadn't been released that wasn't thought much about when the land
was sold. I doubt that in those situations that the wife/widow was
actually coming against the grantee and threatening to assert her
dower rights.
Jerry
Ukes <duke_of...@hotmail.com>
Huntersglenn
I want to add one more thing. Take a close look at the date on the
deed and compare it to the date it was given approval in the court -
I've seen a lot of deeds, all through the years, where it's been
several years between the date of sale and the date the deed was
registered. In a lot of the cases, it was family to family sales,
but not always. And, at least in North Carolina, deeds to not have
to be officially registered with the county court in order to be
valid. So, you can run into cases where a person purchased land,
but did not register the deed until they wanted to sell it again -
the wife could be deceased by that time (or I guess it would be
wives, since you've got two wives involved by then - the one from
the first sale and the one from the next sale).
Cathy
Huntersglenn <hunter...@cox.net>
JYoun...@aol.com
> Joan - The vast majority of my research has been in NJ too
> (Gloucester County / West Jersey) and I've seen very few deeds from
> before 1785 or so to which the grantor's wife was a party. I looked
> at "Colonial Conveyances" (which is an index of the West Jersey &
> East Jersey "Secretary of State" deeds from between 1664 & 1794 (if
> you want a copy, e-mail me)), and I'd estimate that wives were
> parties to only about 15% of deeds from this period. Now some of
> these deeds were given by men who weren't married, but most of them
> undoubtedly were married, but their wives never formally
> relinquished their dower. (NJ enacted a law in Feb.. 1727/8 that
> specified how a wife her dower rights, but that law was disallowed
> by London in 1731. NJ enacted another law regulating the
> relinquishment of dower in 1743 that was not disallowed).
>
> In the late 1700's, deeds with both the husband and the wife as
> grantors (and the resulting private examination of the wife) became
> much more common, but still not something that was always done. I
> have an ancestor who was the grantor on about 10 deeds between 1790
> & 1808, and his wife was a party to about half of them. In 1808 he
> gave a deed without his wife as a party in which he conveyed all of
> the property he owned to a buyer. In 1810, his wife relinquished
> her dower in that same property to the same buyer.
>
Jerry-
The vast bulk of my research has also been in South Jersey--both at
Gloucester County Historical Society and also Salem County
Courthouse.
I'd have to ask whether you are going from deeds in books (Colonial
Conveyances et al) or whether you have examined the actual deeds as
I have. Very often the BOOKS and abstracts will NOT mention the
separate paper signed by the wife relinquishing dower rights on the
sale of a property -- but the original deeds always do.
This is not limited to post Rev. War deeds either...dower rights are
based upon English law. Dower rights existed and were protected
before the American Revolution. Your 15% figure just doesn't hold
up to scrutiny. Before replying to this message I also contacted my
cousin who has done more extensive land record research in NJ than I
have and who was a former librarian at Gloucester County Historical
Society and she also agrees that dower rights were always
considered because failure to do so would have cast any deed in
legal limbo. Of course, a man could PURCHASE property without his
wife's consent--the dower rights issue only emerges when the
property of a married man is SOLD.
Joan
Ukes
I've seen dozens of actual colonial NJ deeds. This afternoon I
looked at copies of 17 West Jersey deeds from between 1700-1780 that
I have on my computer. The grantors on 13 of them were a man without
a wife being mentioned, and the grantors on 4 of them were a man and
his wife. Now all 13 of the men may not have been married, but two
of them I know for a fact were married when they signed the deeds,
and I'm confident that further research would show that others were
married as well.
> Very often the BOOKS and abstracts will NOT mention the
> separate paper signed by the wife relinquishing dower rights on the
> sale of a property -- but the original deeds always do.
>
> This is not limited to post Rev. War deeds either...dower rights are
> based upon English law. Dower rights existed and were protected
> before the American Revolution. Your 15% figure just doesn't hold
> up to scrutiny.
Take a look at this page from Colonial Conveyances, which is pretty
typical http://tinyurl.com/ycmm6e5
If there's an "ux" next to the grantor's name, that means that the
wife was a party to the deed. Since the names listed are for
grantors and grantees, and dower would need to be released only by
grantors, the estimate that I gave that wives were on about 15% of
deeds previously incorrectly included grantees in the count and
should more correctly be more like 30%. Plus, as I mentioned
earlier, some of the grantor men were not married, so there was no
dower to release. Still, the evidence indicates that most of the
time land was conveyed in colonial New Jersey by married men without
their wives formally relinquishing their dower rights.
> Before replying to this message I also contacted my
> cousin who has done more extensive land record research in NJ than I
> have and who was a former librarian at Gloucester County Historical
> Society and she also agrees that dower rights were always
> considered because failure to do so would have cast any deed in
> legal limbo. Of course, a man could PURCHASE property without his
> wife's consent--the dower rights issue only emerges when the
> property of a married man is SOLD.
What should have happened and what actually did happen are two
different things. If a grantee wanted to make sure he had clear
title, he would have recorded the deed immediately after he bought
the property. Yet most of the NJ colonial deeds that I've seen
weren't recorded until decades after the property was conveyed. And
that's just the deeds that were recorded - we all know that many
deeds were never recorded. Dower was in many ways less of a legal
threat than an unrecorded deed, since any dower threat ended when
the wife/widow died, while an unrecorded deed could cause problems
many decades later.
Have you ever seen any widows having their dower set off in colonial
NJ? I haven't. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but my guess is that
it was rare. I do have an ancestor who had her dower set off from
the property of second husband (not the father of her children) in
the 1820's. It's in the Gloucester County book of divisions.
Jerry
Ukes <duke_of...@hotmail.com>
Ian Goddard
singhals wrote:
> I have been told for 3 decades now that in the Mid-Atlantic area, a
> man could not sell land without his wife's formal consent and
> relinquishment of her dower-right. This Relinquishment has provided
> the given name of any number of women who would be otherwise
> unknown.
Although it's right outside my area (an ocean away!) I have found
this thread quite interesting as it casts light on the practice
found in the Wakefield manorial court rolls. Where husband and wife
surrendered land it was necessary that she give her own, independent
agreement. Yhe usual form of words was "she being examined
separately".
--
Ian
The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang
at austonley org uk
Ian Goddard <godd...@hotmail.co.uk>
J. Hugh Sullivan
> singhals wrote:
>
> > I have been told for 3 decades now that in the Mid-Atlantic area, a
> > man could not sell land without his wife's formal consent and
> > relinquishment of her dower-right. This Relinquishment has provided
> > the given name of any number of women who would be otherwise
> > unknown.
>
> Although it's right outside my area (an ocean away!) I have found
> this thread quite interesting as it casts light on the practice
> found in the Wakefield manorial court rolls. Where husband and wife
> surrendered land it was necessary that she give her own, independent
> agreement. Yhe usual form of words was "she being examined
> separately".
>
I have found the same notation. But since I have found "Sullivan"
spelled 126 different ways so far, I am a bit confused about what
rules they might have followed consistently, if any.
I have one relative who bought and sold land numerous times and I
have found only one occasion where the wife released her dower.
Inconsistency is very consistent. 8-)
Hugh
Ea...@bellsouth.net (J. Hugh Sullivan)
singhals
> singhals wrote:
>
> > I have been told for 3 decades now that in the Mid-Atlantic area, a
> > man could not sell land without his wife's formal consent and
> > relinquishment of her dower-right. This Relinquishment has provided
> > the given name of any number of women who would be otherwise
> > unknown.
>
> this thread quite interesting as it casts light on the practice
> found in the Wakefield manorial court rolls. Where husband and wife
> surrendered land it was necessary that she give her own, independent
> agreement. Yhe usual form of words was "she being examined
> separately".
>
> Ian Goddard
Yes, that's the terminology ... sometimes with "privately and"
preceding separately.
Cheryl
singhals <sing...@erols.com>
Ian Goddard
> > singhals wrote:
> >
> > > I have been told for 3 decades now that in the Mid-Atlantic area, a
> > > man could not sell land without his wife's formal consent and
> > > relinquishment of her dower-right. This Relinquishment has provided
> > > the given name of any number of women who would be otherwise
> > > unknown.
> >
> > Although it's right outside my area (an ocean away!) I have found
> > this thread quite interesting as it casts light on the practice
> > found in the Wakefield manorial court rolls. Where husband and wife
> > surrendered land it was necessary that she give her own, independent
> > separately".
> >
> > Ian Goddard <godd...@hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
>
> I have found the same notation. But since I have found "Sullivan"
> spelled 126 different ways so far, I am a bit confused about what
> rules they might have followed consistently, if any.
>
I don't know the circumstances in the US; presumably manorial courts
never existed but the notation would imply some sort of local court.
In that case there are two different considerations.
The actual process would be a public, spoken one. There would be an
expectation on all sides that custom would be followed. That
expectation was clearly strong enough for the process to have been
transplanted across the Atlantic. It's quite possible that in the
actual court there might have been a certain amount of informality
around the edges (e.g. "Is your mother keeping well, Mr Sullivan")
but not so as to affect the form in which business was conducted.
The clerk's role would be to sit there quietly and record what he
thought he heard so how he spelled names would be between himself
and his pen. It would not be his role to pipe up and ask how a name
should be spelled and in many cases such a question would have been
futile anyway. Variation in spelling names on the part of the clerk
does not indicate variation in conduct of the business.
This applies to a large proportion of genealogical sources. We are
dealing with a non-bureaucratic age when the spoken ceremony was
what counted. The documents are simply a record that the event took
place and would be of secondary importance. Where the participants
were illiterate spelling would be what the clerk thought he'd heard.
Even where the participants were literate they might not have been
consulted; in England the first, and for a long time the only,
chance we get to see how our ancestors spelled their names is their
signature on the marriage register and so far I've come across two
of mine whose ideas of spelling their names differed from those of
the vicar who clearly mustn't have asked before he made out the rest
of the entry.
J. Hugh Sullivan
My honest thought is that, and I speak only of my ancestors to avoid
dissing someone, prior to 1800 they were just ignorant. And for
generations many people considered a handshake better than a written
document filed in court.
When children recount I find people born in two different states. I
find a man named Josiah who never used that as any part of his name.
Most could neither read nor write - so spelling was phonetic unless
it was a Bible name.
I find people who never moved but lived in as many as three counties
during their lifetime. It's funny that I know that and they probably
did not.
And I don't think the Interstates were too clearly marked before
1790 either.
Ian Goddard
> > > I have been told for 3 decades now that in the Mid-Atlantic area, a
> > > man could not sell land without his wife's formal consent and
> > > relinquishment of her dower-right. This Relinquishment has provided
> > > the given name of any number of women who would be otherwise
> > > unknown.
> >
> > Although it's right outside my area (an ocean away!) I have found
> > this thread quite interesting as it casts light on the practice
> > found in the Wakefield manorial court rolls. Where husband and wife
> > surrendered land it was necessary that she give her own, independent
> > agreement. Yhe usual form of words was "she being examined
> > separately".
>
> preceding separately.
>
When looking at a restricted body of material it's difficult to be
sure whether its practices are local or general. One practice in
Wakefield which I've wondered about was their method of gaining a
clear title. This involved a legal fiction whereby the property was
allegedly transferred outside of the court. This was illegal and
the property would be taken into the lord's hands and an
announcement made at three successive courts. After that it could
be leased out to the intended recipient without fear of someone
subsequently claiming an interest. Does anyone know whether this was
a general phenomenon.
--
Ian
The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang
at austonley org uk
------- End of Forwarded Message
Ian Goddard <godd...@hotmail.co.uk>
cecilia
Ian Goddard wrote:
>[...] the notation would imply some sort of local court.
> In that case there are two different considerations.
>
>The actual process would be a public, spoken one. [...]
I was amused, when registering a death in the UK at the end of 1999,
that the registrar, having accepted the doctor's chit that I
proferred, was willing to look at (presumably for spelling purposes)
the piece of paper on which I had written out full details of the
deceased, but explained that the registration procedure required
that I answered her questions out loud.
my...@ic24.net (cecilia)