alt Hacker NewsThis happened in a 50k people town where my father is from in 1982 with a BIG flood that destroyed the town land registry documents (among a lot of the town). Since he's a lawyer, had first hand experience and I was always curious I asked many things about this a while back. Basically, what happened is that they rebuilt it from proof of ownership and testimonies of the people. You can never get to 100% recovery like that, but everyone knows who their neighbor is, at least in a town that is small like this.
So they rebuilt it first from first hand proof, then by testimonies, with a period of counter claims available IIRC. For sure there were some false claims, but given the magnitude of the disaster, this is the best solution within that context.
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There is little alternative.
A great-great grandfather of mine was mayor of a town through which the front passed twice during WWI. All that survived were basements. Your father's account more or less describes the process by which the land was reparceled.
This is where "possession is 9/10ths of the law" comes from.
There are also physical markers in the ground at the corners of most properties. So if you had to, you could send a surveyor out to recertify boundaries. That would get very expensive quickly, however.
Not saying that this is the only reason, but it is a big reason why we have a land survey of our property on hand on paper and stored online. If something ever happened to the registry, we could at least establish our claim to our land.
Wouldn't work in a city like NYC where nobody knows their neighbours and a chunk of houses are empty and only owned by shady shell companies as investments...
I always wonder how things would be reconciled if something similar happened to a bank. What would be the simplest way to ‘download’ one’s balance whilst proving that the downloaded files were signed by the bank?
Definitely only works in high trust societies. Heck, even in normal times in India there's a rampant land mafia of which many politicians are a part. Forged provenance, illegal squatting and forced seizure, extraction and evictions are the norm.
And this is why we need title insurance :(
In my country, titles are always issued in duplicate. The land registry gets one of these originals, and the landowner the other. Just about every landowner has their original on their person, or held by a bank if it's mortgaged.
So all is not lost if the registry goes up in flames.
Happened here about 30 years ago with a fire in a council planning office. All building plans and records were lost. It was enormously useful because there was no way to prove that that house addition there wasn't approved or in any plans. Fans of Yes Minister will know the appropriate quote from Sir Humphrey.
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> Basically, what happened is that they rebuilt it from proof of ownership and testimonies of the people
In a similar vein, I was once curious how you would prove your identity if ALL of your relevant documents (passport, driver's license, birth certificate etc) were lost in some kind of cataclysm e.g. a house fire pre-digital etc
Turns out there is actually a mechanism for this:
- get multiple people to sign sworn affidavits that you are who you say you are
- that begins the "paper trail" of evidence that allows you to start getting the rest of the document chain
- you rebuild from there.
If you're married, there is already a similar process for when a spouse takes the last name of the other spouse. The marriage certificate is the first step and then it goes from there for driver's license, passport, credit cards and so on.