For Genealogists, What is the Meaning of Entailed Land?

As a family history researcher you should learn to interpret the laws in relation to land purchasing and land succession when working with early land records. Following the ownership of land from one generation to the next is very useful for genealogist, as well as exciting. You can trace how the land was passed down and ultimately what happened to it. You will see the term "entail" often used in relation to how land was passed down from one generation to the next.

Land could be held in fee tail or fee simple. Fee simple is similar to how we own land in modern times. It is an unrestricted form of ownership. The reverse is fee tail which was a restricted form of ownership. With fee tail, land could not be mortgaged, devised by will or sold. You can think of fee tail as being more of a tenant relationship to land. In land that was passed down fee tail a person did not really own that land but was more of a tenant for life.

Here is where the term "entail" gets involved. Land held under fee simple could be converted to fee tail. This is called entailed land. Once the land was entailed in this fashion it remained so forever. By the time the colonies were started, entailing land had been widely used in England for hundreds of years. The purpose of entailing in England might be obvious. There the land was scarce and society was stratified, so entailing allowed large estates to remain intact over long periods, by disabling future generation's ability to sell off parts of land. Entailing in the American colonies was apparently held over from old English practice, even though it made less logical sense given the vast amount of land.

As a family history researcher you might look for examples of phrases that indicate land had been entailed. Land could be entailed by a will or deed as long as it was written in a special way. If you see in a will that a father left to his son land but the will says something like "to Michael Johnson and the heirs of his body", that indicates that the father intended the land to be entailed. The phrase "heirs of his body" meant the land was not to be fully owned by Michael Johnson but was to be passed down to his lineal descendants eternally. The phrase "unless he (or she) dies without issue" essentially meant the same thing. This is why when later looking at Michael Johnson's will you will not see him mentioning the land. He had no real ownership to it and so could not sell it or pass it down of his own free will. How the land was to be passed down had already been directed by Michael's father (from father to oldest son or child, and on and on), unless Michael had no heirs or at some point in the chain no heirs were produced.

How did the authorities know who was to get the land, as it passed down? Primogeniture determined who got the land in cases when land was entailed. Primogeniture was the standard practice in inheritance law, for land ownership, and simply dictated how land passed down in a lineal fashion, when any heirs existed or when entailing took place. This practice of primogeniture and entailing land was most common in the south.

Mark D. Jordan is a writer and researcher living in Pennsylvania. More genealogy related material can be seen at http://familyhistoryresearch.net and http://celticgirafferesearch.com

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