> A few questions...
> 1. has the case you point to below been documented anywhere?
Not to my knowledge.
> 2. did the gentleman in question look for help from any source
> (apart from a lawyer)? If so, what happened?
He received notice by mail of a claim. He is illiterate. His wife
(recently deceased) was minimally literate. They didn't fully
understand the purport of the notice but passed it to a slightly more
literate relative who was to look into it somehow. The looking into
seems never to have happened. As a consequence, the claim was
uncontested. When a third party, contracted verbally by my neighbor,
began to cut timber on the land, he was accused of theft by the (newly
legal) owner. At that point the third party (literate) and the
neighbor consulted a lawyer who reported that the claim to title to a
portion of my neighbor's land had been uncontested and so was now,
under the new GIS legislation, guaranteed by the Crown to the predator
claimant.
> 3. what kind of help might have been useful for him do you think and
> how could that help have been made available in your community or in
> a way that he could easily access...
Well, in rural Nova Scotia, there are a lot of older people who are
functionally or totally illiterate. They (as well as many quite
literate older people) tend to depend on extended family networks for
support. This tends to be almost orthogonal to the established legal
conventions of documentary notification, statutory benchmarks and the
like.
When I bought a piece of land 35 years ago, the vendor and another,
older guy (born about 1900) walked the boundary with me through dense
bush, pointing out landmarks. That old Clayton said "This is the
boundary that my father and I knew in 1913 when we lived on this land"
was my guarantee. Certified by living memory of a relative of the
vendor. Ray should recognize this as how things are done.
So: lets say that you can't get title to property the ownership of
which you're contesting until an advocate has verified by personal,
face to face conversation that the affected parties understand what's
going on. The claimant has to pay for that but cannot approach or
influence the advocate. There is no digital way to do this. In
today's world, I'm not sure there is *any* way to do it. Most educated
people barely realize that people such as my neighbor exist and have
never met one.
The predator in this case had spent many hours amassing a collection
of documents, essentially the corpus of a detailed title search, from
which it was possible to infer that an error had been made (or
possibly that a scam had been perpetrated) 90 or 100 years ago such
that a parcel woodland acreage had more or less vanished, becoming
part of another, or possibly two other, parcels. No question of
ownership had arisen since that time. That's vague enough that it
could have been contested, even though the "old guys" who could
have vouched for it 40 years ago were now dead.
But an illiterate guy, however skilled a horseman and woodsman, would
need a lot of verbal discussion without big words or legal jargon to
get it. He'd want to consult relatives who might know the story
gramps told to uncle George that related to the situation. He might
have to go out in the woods and look at the lay of the relevant land.
The other option, of course, is for 4 young guys to take the predator
out behind the barn and beat the shit out of him with pick axe
handles. That's not a preferred methodology here in Lunenburg County
although if I worked at it and hung around in places that I usually
avoid, I think I might find some volunteers.
- Mike
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
_______________________________________________
Futurework mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
