Burdick Family Land Records, Wexford County, Michigan Liber 80 page 440

I am posting information gleaned from land records in the areas where our family’s ancestors resided. You can read more about this project in the overview. You may also check my deed record listing, which I will update with each post.

This is a deed transcription I found in my book, after I thought my “Burdick” deeds were completed. This one explains a little about the transaction recorded in liber 46, page 590. In that deed, Mary J. Burdick sold all but a strip on the north side of her property in Colfax Township. In this deed, that strip is sold, after her death.

Mary Jane Burdick died on 8 May 1911. Although I do not know if the strip of land described here had a house on it, my guess is that it did not. The deed did not say, “and other valuable consideration”, a clue to a possible mortgage. It looks like it may have been two bare acres. According to the 1910 census of Colfax Township, Wexford County, Michigan, George and Mary Jane Burdick were living with her son Fink and his family. Although George Washington Burdick died a few years later, in 1914, he had signed his land to his wife before she died, and it seems that his other holdings had already been sold.

Things have changed a bit since this deed was executed. It would not be possible to legally sell a a land as an heir to an estate, if an estate had not yet been opened in probate court. I also wonder that George W. Burdick did not sign this deed as an heir to his wife’s estate.

1. “1910 US Federal Census”, database, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 18 November 2009), entry for Fink C. Burdick, [b.] 1859/1860, Colfax, Wexford County, Michigan.