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By Nashville Indiana Title Company
Handwriting on Your Deed? We Might Need It Retyped Clean An old warranty deed came across the desk recently, one of those documents where the legal desc...
An old warranty deed came across the desk recently, one of those documents where the legal description had been added by hand in the margin, ink gone brown and the loops of the cursive running right up against the printed text. Perfectly legible to the person who wrote it in the 1960s. Not so easy for a recorder scanning it in 2026.
That handwriting is not a problem with your property. It just means we have some cleanup to do before your deed gets recorded, and it is worth understanding why.
The Brown County Recorder's office keeps the official record of who owns what. When a deed comes in, it gets scanned and indexed so anyone searching the chain of title later can find it and read it.
Handwriting throws a wrench into that. A scanner does not interpret cursive the way a human does, and a legal description written by hand fifty years ago can be genuinely hard to read once it is a grainy image on a screen.
If a future title searcher squints at a scanned deed and cannot tell whether that number is a 3 or an 8, that is a small gap that can slow down the next transaction on your property. Clean, typed text keeps the record honest and readable for whoever comes after you.
Not every mark on paper is a problem. A handwritten signature is supposed to be handwritten, and initials in the margin next to a correction are normal. Those stay exactly as they are.
The part that usually needs attention is the legal description... the metes and bounds, the section and range, the references to a creek bed or a fence line. On rural Brown County property especially, those descriptions can run long and specific, and if the original was penciled or typed on a typewriter that skipped letters, we transcribe it into clean type.
We are not changing anything. We are copying what the record already says into a form the recorder can accept and future searches can read.
This is where care matters more than speed. When we retype a legal description, every word, every number, every "thence North 42 degrees East" has to match the existing record precisely.
Get one digit wrong and you have created a discrepancy that a title search will flag down the road. So the retyped version gets checked against the original deed, and often against the prior recorded documents in the chain, before anything moves forward.
On a wooded parcel near the state park, where the description might reference a point along Salt Creek or a corner marked by a tree that no longer stands, this checking is the whole job. The words have to carry the property forward accurately even when the landmarks have shifted.
Older cabins and family acreage are the usual place we run into handwriting. A property that has passed through the same family for two or three generations often carries deeds prepared long before word processors, sometimes with corrections added by hand as boundaries got clarified.
You will also see it on parcels that were split off from a larger farm decades ago, where someone described the new piece by hand because a formal survey came later, if it came at all. None of this is unusual for the area, and none of it means your purchase is in trouble.
It just means the document preparation step takes a little more attention than it would on a subdivision home built last year with a clean, typed description from day one.
For you, this mostly happens behind the scenes. When we prepare the deed for your closing, we review the description, decide whether it needs to be retyped for clarity, and produce a clean version that will record without a hitch.
If we do retype anything, you are not signing a different property. You are signing the same land described in language a scanner and a future title searcher can both read. At Nashville Indiana Title Company, this kind of cleanup is part of getting a deed ready, not an extra hurdle we hand you.
The one thing worth doing on your end is telling us early if you know the property has an old or handwritten deed in its history. That gives us the runway to sort the description out well before your closing date instead of the morning of.
Sometimes the right call is to keep the original exactly as written and prepare a fresh, typed deed that carries the same description into your ownership. That way the historical document stays intact in the record and your new deed is clean going forward.
Other times a description is clear enough that retyping would add risk instead of removing it. We would rather preserve a legible original than transcribe it and introduce a chance for error.
That judgment comes from doing closings on these older Brown County properties for years and knowing which descriptions need help and which are fine as they are. The goal is always the same... a deed that records cleanly and reads clearly for the next owner, whoever that turns out to be, and however far down the road they show up at the recorder's office looking for your name.