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Bearing Reference in Legal Descriptions
Posted by ryancj31 on June 12, 2021 at 5:28 pmOn a couple occasions my boss has suggested including a bearing reference in a legal description.
Along the lines of:??Commencing at the east 1/4 corner of said section thence <brg>, along the east line of said 1/4, <dist> to the ne corner of said section;
thence <brg> <dist> to the point of beginning of the parcel to be described;
thence….?
That made me realize that I very rarely have encountered such a thing much less wrote it into a legal description I??ve made. Nearly all descriptions I encounter commence at a single section corner then make their way to the POB without necessarily calling out any bearing along a section line.
I??d say about 25% of descriptions I encounter and write inadvertently call out a bearing along a section line because it makes sense to follow that particular line for whatever distance (usually short of the full length of the 1/4 line). But a vast majority commence at a section corner then just take a wild bearing to the POB.
I do however include a bearing reference to a section line on all maps.
Seems like the addition of that one additional call is well worth the ink.
What are your thoughts, practices, encounters?
aliquot replied 2 years, 10 months ago 9 Members · 19 Replies- 19 Replies
I will reference the basis of bearings at the end of the description along with the basis of distances. Using an established line as the basis isn’t a bad idea, especially if you don’t have the ability to put the survey on a global type of system such as SPC, UTM, “True North”.
Descriptions are a mix of defined legal terms, title history, old wives tales, personal preference, and the abuse of the english language.
A basis of bearings is helpful and should be included in most M and B descriptions. Proper calls to natural and artificial monuments are much more important.
In other notes:
The word said should not be used except in reference to a qualified term used in the previous sentence. It is a short form of “the aforesaid”. An example is, ‘Commencing at the northeast 16th corner of Section eight, thence along the north 16th line of said section”. If the folliwing line refers to section eight, the term ‘said’ should not be used.
Style is one thing, but abuse of defined terms in legal documents is another.
My .02, Tom
I always use bearings in my legals. As well as to calls, monument calls etc. Bearings will give the reader or surveyor a good angular comparison between the lines for searching purposes as well as a check of their final calculations.
My advice would just be plagiarism of Wattles. The only departures from his excellent text, might be that, due to peculiarities of NC, I tend to include metadata of my GNSS tie to grid and two sets if coordinates.
I’ve never written a aliquot description but if I did, I’d bastardize it with some bearings in a heartbeat. I might even add a coordinate pair or two.
The Basis of Bearings is a necessary inclusion in a boundary description. See Wattles “Writing Legal Descriptions”, Section 4.5 which states in my 1979 edition in part: “In a description, the basis of bearings, sometimes stated as base of bearings, should be established by the recitation of a control one in the first course.” Note the use of “should” and not “may”. I naively thought that this was routinely done as my practice is fundamental limited to a single PLSS state.
Descriptions in the PLSS have specific meanings. When you change the nature of the description, you obscure the manner in which title was created and has been maintained.
When forced to prepare such abominations, a declaration of intent is an absolute must. Somethjng like ‘this description is intended to include all of x and no other property’. In general I push to keep the survey information on the recorded survey and leave the description as written. If there is a problem with the description the owners execute a document to settle the issue, but that’s a different topic.
The point of this rambling is simple. The description in the creating document for a parcel should be left intact. Additions and subtractions rarely accomplish any good purpose. The following surveyor is generally left with a broken chain of title full of half baked ideas and wives tales. The client pays to unravel the mess…
Aliquot descriptions are perfect………………………….in theory. Leave them alone.
Your drawing may show the bearings and distances you determined for each side, but DO NOT bastardize them with M&B replacement descriptions.
When a tract or tracts have been separated from an aliquot part, first call out the aliquot part by its true name then list the exceptions thereto.
This is very important because your interpretation of where the aliquot boundaries are located may not hold when another surveyor comes along and finds monuments that you did not find because their locations didn’t fit your math solution. Skipping over center corner monuments is far too common.
@thebionicman I guess your mention of calling out monuments would??ve been one of my next posts on here.
Again I want to mention, for better or worse, local conventions around here. Nobody calls out monuments either set or found in their descriptions. OK maybe one surveyor in 50. Very rare. There seems to be a timeframe in the 60s or 70s where it was more prevalent. But today very uncommon.
You are lucky if you get a call to an adjoining property line or corner with a deed call out. I have managed to make proper calls to adjoiners on a vast majority of my legal descriptions and that is why my descriptions are twice as long as most I encounter. Considering pushing for including monument calls now to so they can be even longer!
WI is a recording state so 99% of new descriptions have a map on file to correlate to. This may have something to do with it? Or laziness? Or cost of ink and paper?
I will say I am a veteran tech still trying to find the time and energy for licensure. I feel that you can only go against the grain so much at any one time when you want to go against a strong local convention or even convention of the surveyors I work under. Luckily all the surveyors I have worked for are willing to listen to any good argument for doing things different. Thus why I am here on this forum.
Always learning! Thanks for input.
Reviewed a survey last week by an out-of-state, but licensed here, surveyor. That was the first survey I have seen in about three decades that called out the monuments. As you say, local practice is whatever it is. Calling one right and one wrong is not truthful. Both describe the exact same tract.
Gee, I thought the question was about original descriptions prepared by the original surveyor. Fundamentally, I would agree with the above Ramble. Record Distance/Bearings vs. resurveyed measured should be noted on the drawing. Surveyors are not the “be all, end all” of title. We are just a part of the “chain” in “chain of title.”
And while we’re at it, what’s the point of not doing slight adjustments to your survey coordinates to match the record survey/calls. As the late J.H. Brosemer used to say sarcastically on this point: “The last one to measure a line is always the correct one.” Or as the public likes to say: “No point in hiring a surveyor, they never measure the same thing anyway.”
Can I get an “Amen” from the choir?
Thanks for the Amen! It’s a good one. (I was in HS when this was on the charts!)
The ramble was a response to the comment about adding bearings, distances and coordinates to existing PLSS descriptions. As you may have noticed, that one strikes a nerve…
As for the OP, I have no objection to including a BOB in metes and bounds descriptions creating a parcel. As Ron White says, I’ve seen me do it…
Make it easy for the next guy to come along to agree with you. There is nothing wrong with leaving more than the absolute minimum of footsteps for the future surveyor to follow.
Personally I disfavor the Commencing … True Point of Beginning format. Not saying its wrong – lots of people use it and always have. I just try to avoid it. To that end I might write:
Beginning at a point on the north line of Section 12, T1S, R1W, W.M. which bears N89?ø45’21″E, 1234.56 feet from the northwest corner of said Section, thence parallel with the west line of said section S 00?ø17’47″E, 456.78 feet ……
In this manner I’m giving the future surveyor bearings along 2 adjacent section lines. If I wasn’t running a parallel line and I still wanted to add a call to the west section line I might write:
Beginning at a point on the north line of Section 12, T1S, R1W, W.M. which bears N89?ø45’21″E, 1234.56 feet from the northwest corner of said Section, said northwest section corner bears N 00?ø17’47″W, 2640.00 feet from the west 1/4 corner of said section, thence S 00?ø29’58″E, 456.78 feet ……
Commencing is in the minimum standards as follows: The
description shall contain dimensions sufficient to enable the description to be plotted and
retraced and shall describe the land surveyed by either government lot, aliquot parts, quarter
section, section, township, range and county; or by metes and bounds commencing with a corner
marked and established in the U.S. Public Land Survey System; or if such land is located in a
recorded subdivision or recorded addition thereto, then by the number or other description of that
lot, block or subdivision thereof. If the parcel is described by metes and bounds it may be
referenced to known lot or block corners in recorded subdivisions or additions.Thus, many of our descriptions for metes and bounds tracts commence at a section corner or quarter corner then follow one or more courses to reach the POB.
Calling out the bounds (i.e. “along the secrion line”, or “to a 2″ iron pipe with brass cap marked…” becomes less important when a link between a recorded survey is made clear, but where surveys are not recorded they are critical.
If you are writing a new description based on a recorded survey the very best description is something like , “the parcel called XXX as shown on the survey recorded at XXX” This incorporates all the information on the plat into the deed.
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