As a family history researcher, you must learn to interpret the laws regarding land purchase and land succession when working with old land records. Following the ownership of land from one generation to the next is very useful for genealogists, as well as exciting. You can track how the land was passed on and ultimately what happened to it. You’ll see that the term “link” is often used in relation to the way the land was passed down from one generation to the next.
The land can be held in cola quota or simple quota. Simple Fee is similar to how we own land in modern times. It is a form of ownership without restrictions. The opposite is fee tail, which was a restricted form of ownership. With fee tail, land could not be mortgaged, probated, or sold. You can think of the fee queue as more of a tenant relationship to the land. On land that was continuously passed down, a person did not actually own that land, but rather a tenant for life.
This is where the term “imply” comes in. Land held under simple fee could be converted to grand fee. This is called bonded land. Once the land was linked in this way, it would remain so forever. By the time the colonies were started, linked land had been used extensively in England for hundreds of years. The purpose of involving England might be obvious. There, land was scarce and society was stratified, so implication allowed large estates to remain untouched for long periods, by disabling the ability of future generations to sell parts of the land. Apparently tying in the American colonies was reserved from the old English practice, although it made less logical sense given the large amount of land.
As a family history researcher, you can look for examples of phrases that indicate that land has been involved. The land can be bound by a will or deed as long as it is written in a special way. If you see in a will that a father went to his land but the will says something like “to Michael Johnson and the heirs of his body”, that indicates that the father intended to bind the land. The phrase “heirs to his body” meant that the land would not be wholly owned by Michael Johnson, but would be passed down eternally to his direct descendants. The phrase “unless he (or she) dies without issue” means essentially the same thing. This is why, when you later look at Michael Johnson’s will, you won’t see him mentioning land. She had no real ownership of it and therefore could not sell or convey it of her own free will. Michael’s father had already indicated how the land was to be passed on (father to eldest son or boy, and so on), unless Michael had no heirs or somewhere in the chain there were no heirs.
How did the authorities know who was going to get the land, as it happened? The primogeniture determined who got the land in cases where the land was tied. The primogeniture was the standard practice in inheritance law, for land ownership, and simply dictated how land was passed on in a linear fashion, when there were heirs, or when bonding was made. This practice of primogeniture and land bonding was more common in the South.