Government Law Newsroom

It Is Possible To Trace The Deeds To The Probate Properties By Searching Under The Previous Owner's Name

The Deeds and Probate Registry is situated in the Registries Building on Deemster's Walk, Bucks Road, Douglas, Isle of Man, IM1 3AR. The Registry is open to members of the public between the hours of 9am and 5pm from Monday to Friday inclusive, but is closed to the public between 1pm to 2pm each day.

All Deeds registered from 1911 to the present day are housed in the Registry, along with all Grants of Probate from 1940 to the present date. Grants of Probate recorded from 1912 to 1939 inclusive are housed at the Isle of Man Public Record Office. All deeds and grants of probate recorded prior to 1911 are housed in the Manx Museum. For information with regards to making an application for probate please see the downloadable documents at the bottom of this page.

The team presently consists of five staff who are responsible for the registration, receipt and safe-keeping of all deeds and for the safe-keeping of all grants of probate after the probate application has been processed by the Administration Division of the General Registry. The staff are not permitted to give legal advice.

All deeds are accepted for registration when they are presented with the appropriate fee payable . A member of staff then proceeds to give the deed a registration number and records on the deed the parish to which it refers, the name of the person responsible for registering the deed and the time and date of registration. The staff are not required to check that a deed is legally valid before accepting it for registration and are prohibited from giving opinions about the contents of any document presented to them.

All the documents held in the Deeds and Probate Registry are available for the public to view, and have copies of, on payment of the prescribed fee. Exemplified and / or certified copies are also available on payment of the prescribed fee. Access to all the information is via name based indices and therefore it is not possible to trace deeds relating to a property from the address alone. Please note that the deeds and grants of probate relate only to property situated on the Isle of Man.

If you do not know who owns a property now, but you do know a previous owner's name, it is possible to trace the deeds to the property by searching under the previous owner's name. If you have neither a current owner or previous owner's name(s), you can contact the Government Rates Department (Telephone +44 (0)1624 685661) and providing the property has a rateable value they should be able to confirm the name of the owner(s) or occupier(s).

Where land has no rateable value, such as on some derelict properties or on farmland, enquiries can be made to the Planning Department to see whether any planning applications have been submitted on the said land from which one may obtain a name. Other avenues of inquiry include local knowledge or by establishing a historical owner from the Woods Atlas which is available to view free of charge in the Deeds Registry. The Woods Atlas was compiled in 1867 and identifies the extent of individual landowners in each parish in the Isle of Man at that time. The name of the landowner in 1867 can then be used to search forward through the deeds housed in the Manx Museum up until 1910, and thereafter in the Deeds Registry up to the present date. This method of searching can be both time consuming and costly.

In the case of agricultural land, enquiries as to the owner can be made to the Department of Agriculture as farmers are required to file annual returns.

People often request to view deeds in the hope of settling a boundary dispute. Although a deed contains a description of the land purchased, it will not provide conclusive evidence of either who owns the boundary or exactly where the boundary lies. The deed may also contain a plan of the land purchased, but again this is unlikely to provide conclusive evidence of either who owns the boundary or exactly where the boundary lies.

Providing you know the registration number, you can obtain a copy of a deed or grant of probate by making a request in writing and enclosing the fee of £ 3.50 per deed / Grant of Probate to cover the cost of extraction, photocopying and postage. Please do not send cash through the post. All cheques should be made payable to "Isle of Man Government" and crossed "Account Payee Only".

Having completed a search, there is no guarantee that the last deed still reflects who owns a particular property as the registration of deeds is not compulsory. Once a deed has been registered it can not be altered in any way.

An index of properties owned by the Isle of Man Government, giving reference to the original deed of conveyance, is also available to view on request and free of charge in the Deeds Registry. The index has been compiled by the Attorney General's Chambers.