Old legal and record term 1500s-1900s
What does demise mean in an old deed?
In a deed, demise means to lease or transfer property for a term; it says nothing about anyone dying. Demise, lease, and to farm let run together as boilerplate. Readers who take demise as a death notice invent funerals that never happened. You will meet it in deeds, mostly 1500s-1900s.
Where it appears: deeds.
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Related terms
Browse the full genealogy records glossary for more occupations, causes of death, and legal terms.
FAQs
Where will I see demise in the records?+
Mostly in deeds, 1500s-1900s. Clerks abbreviated freely and spelling wandered, so expect variant wordings around it.
Do these old terms still matter for family history?+
Yes, a single word can settle a relationship. Relict names a widow, et ux hides an unnamed wife, natural son points at a parent. The words are dry, but what they encode about a family is not.
Where do these definitions come from?+
They are drawn from period dictionaries, government archive glossaries, and standard genealogy references, cross-checked against each other; provenance is documented with the dataset. Inside AncestorIQ, Deep Research reads the record itself and explains terms like this in context, against your ancestor's own document.
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