I do know honorable lawyers, so I hope this won't give offense: In French, the same word — "avocat" — means both "lawyer" and "avocado." Somehow, that seems like more than coincidence.
@duane-frymire or something much more mundane like an area fenced off with plans to bury the family.
@aliquot You mean held for cemetery purposes? Again, not what the note said. Do you note possible cemetery every time you see a fenced in area? Mere fencing does not indicate occupation for any specific purpose.
I think the note was fine, and the follow up call was fine, but still funny.
Not all cemeteries are mentioned in the record, nor by a useful person during the survey. So it's worth noting if you see physical evidence of use/occupation for cemetery purposes. And I think the only thing that qualifies would be headstones of some sort. If the Attorney wants to know if anyone is actually buried there, then I would discuss why/what are they trying to do. Then we could move on to whether to retain a firm to do some GPR or maybe need a level 2 or 3 archeological dig. But much like utilities, if you want me to say someone or how many someones is actually under that headstone then we need to investigate further. And if you need to know how many headstones, what sort of configuration, etc. etc., that again is probably not under the current contract.
@duane-frymire I have no compliments about your note. I think I have used "graves" though to avoid these kinds of questions. When does a grave become a cemetery? And "cemetery puropses" doesn't mean there are any graves.
"Held for cemetery purposes" denotes some kind of thought or document but no actual "occupation".
An area occupied for cemetery purposes but with no graves could be graded, walkways built, blank headstones put in place, or even a structure built to serve as an office for a cemetery...
I don't know about you, but there certainly has been a few times that I have been burned by making assumptions based on a statement that seemed obvious, but turned out to not be true, because I read between the lines a little too much.
@aliquot For you're consideration:
"Pinelawn contends that the land comprising the three taxed parcels is not being currently utilized only in the sense that it is being held in reserve for future burial of the dead. In our opinion the taxed parcels are being utilized for cemetery purposes even though no dead body has yet to be interred therein. As the Court of Appeals stated some 70 years ago in People ex rel. Buffalo Burial Park Assn. v Stilwell (190 N.Y. 284, 290-291): "There can be no doubt that the lands of a cemetery association actually used and occupied for cemetery purposes are exempt from taxation under chapter 310 of the Laws of 1879 [the progenitor of our present Real Property Law, § 450] * * * But if it be assumed for the purpose of the argument that everything stated in the return is to be taken as true, these facts do not necessarily show that the land was taxable, or that it was not devoted to cemetery purposes within the fair meaning of the law. The cemetery in question was, to use a business expression, a going and growing concern. It was not all occupied by burial plots or by the graves of the dead. It may not be fully occupied for such purposes for many years to come. Of course it is not necessary that the cemetery should be filled with graves in order to be entitled to the exemption" (emphasis supplied). (See People ex rel. Oak Hill Cemetery Assn. v Pratt, 129 N.Y. 68.) "
Occupation for cemetery purposes is not the same as held for cemetery purposes, and occupation for cemetery purposes means graves were observed. I rest my case.
@holy-cow Oscar Zerk was for sure a cool guy, but whoever wrote "While still in his teens, he devised an electrically operated textile machine controlled by a then-unheard of punch card system," is off the mark, in regard to the "then-unheard of" claim. Zerk would have been in his teens in the 1890s. Joseph Marie Jacquard around 1804 had developed a punch-card-controlled loom, and even he was building on the works of prior inventors. With improvements by others, Jacquard's invention soon achieved major commercial success, about 80 years prior to the efforts of the teenaged Zerk.
By the way, the lead photo in the Wikipedia article below is a posthumous portrait of Jacquard, woven by a Jacquard loom. Pretty good for the first half of the 1800s (and I like the tool rack in the background).
Very interesting. One of my old nom de guerre was the Babbage Society. Stolen from a book called in the Country of the Blind. He used the principles of Jacquard's Loom to design a punch card driven Analytical Machine (EDIT:as mentioned in the wiki article I see). IE the basis for the modern computer. In the Early 90's a group actually built his analytical machine using 1800s technology and found that it worked. (Babbage never built, he just came up with the idea).
The book was very interesting and my first exposure to the word meme.
The fictional Babbage Society had built the Analytical Machine to determine probabilistic future outcomes of society and would release memes to subtly guide things in the direction they want.
On a side note,
A girl goes to the OBGYN and is very nervous.
"I am worried about getting pregnant, is it possible to get pregnant if I only have Anal sex?"
To which the doctor answered,
"How do you think Lawyers are conceived?"
@duane-frymire thanks for sharing this. It's interesting.
It looks like the court agreed with me that land can be occupied for cemetery purposes without having actual burials.
Land "Occupied for cemetery purposes" was exempt from taxation, but "Of course it is not necessary that the cemetery should be filled with graves in order to be entitled to the exemption."
So according to the court, for taxation, land "occupied for cemetery purposes" doesn't have to have graves. Of course, that doesn't mean that land occupied for cemetery purposes doesn't need to have graves to meet the requirments of other legal provisions (or for taxation outside of NY).
This certainly supports an attorney who is unsure if there are graves based on the note.
Again I have no critism of your use of that note. We can't ever include all information that could be useful to all future users of our plats.
@aliquot You're still missing the distinction between "occupied" and "held", but that's okay the law is a very nuanced thing.
The only reason I continue to post on this is that you are questioning the sufficiency of a surveyors note that could lead to liability for a surveyor. I would testify that the note is sufficient and fully describes the conditions observed in a way to alert the holder of the map that graves and/or burial plots are in existence on the parcel, rather than a mere future contemplated use.
@duane-frymire as I said it's sufficient for most survey purposes, but it doesn't answer the question of whether any bodies are buried there are any liability issues unless you were specifically hired to locate dead bodies.
The court explicitly said that the term "occupied for cemetery purposes" can include land with no graves. You are right, land can be "held for cemetery purposes" without being "occupied for cemetery purposes" but as the court clearly stated, land can be occupied for cemetery purposes without bodies.
Also, even though the court said the same thing I am saying, I think its important to point out that I wouldn't try to make an argument about a survey note based on a court decision analyzing a tax law, unless that tax law was the specific reason for the note. Tax laws are notorious for having there own definitions that are in opposition to the definitions used in other areas of the law.
@aliquot You will not have luck passing a law school exam. But more importantly you fail the common sense test.
Some surveyors are just so bad at interpretation of language. I don't even know what you're talking about at this point. I don't know how you get any of your arguments out of what the court said. But that's actually pretty normal. I've been on cross exam for hours with gibberish like this. Court has always agreed with me.
cmon y'all play nice
it's not as bad as this
... hopefully..
@jitterboogie I thought I was being nice...
I was only adding levity, and just keeping it light and fun..carry on...
Final day of the Lawyer saga, the second landowner agreed with my client to pay 1/2 of a survey where I basically fixed all their problems for less than 1/10th of any other solution. According to the attorney this landowner was uber upset and wanted me to remove his tract from the survey. I refused, talked them down from that and filed the survey. The "angry" landowner came in today happy as anyone I've seen and paid the bill. Is there a bull$iit" class given to attorneys to teach them how to stir everything up. This guy told me how happy I was to clean up any title issues he had. The opposite of what the attorney said.
