Our Friends, The Record-Keepers

     I just stumbled over this gem:

People who don’t write down their history get discovered by people who do. https://t.co/1gyjF7Z1E0

— Kitler (@Kitler512) October 15, 2025

     As I’m fascinated by moral theory, including the theory of natural rights, it got me going immediately: Is the practice of recording events in an enduring form a prerequisite for the emergence and acceptance of property rights?

     Think about it for a moment.

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     Two old sayings come to mind:

• “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
• “If you don’t write it down, it never happened.”

     Those are not unquestionable truths that express aspects of objective reality. They’re summaries of why and how people remember, think, and act. Just as the concept of identity depends upon continuity over an interval of time, the concept of property cannot be fathomed without duration. The origin of property in land, or “real property” as the lawyers say, was tenancy rather than any legal procedure or fiction. “That’s Smith’s land. His father and grandfather lived there.” Consider in that light the old term for a tract of land with a recognized owner: a freehold.

     But tenancy, to be recognized as such, requires memory. Human memories shift and fade. The keeping of records – the less perishable, the better – obviates the need for people to remember the details of a particular person’s tenancy over a particular tract. Whether they’re kept in cuneiform or in cursive, such records establish the tenancy required confirm Smith’s ownership of “Smith’s land.”

     Contrast that with property in things other than land: “movable property.” You have no deed to your clothing, your tools, or any of the other items you regard as yours. They pass far more easily from your ownership to that of another, whether with or without your assent – and if they do, there’s no record by which you can claim that they’re rightfully yours, barring supporting evidence that must be introduced in a court fight. That makes your ownership less “real” than that of the land you own.

     (There is an exception, of course: the motor vehicle, for which the State now demands that you acquire a deed from the State. But let’s defer that subject to another screed.)

     So record-keeping is the indispensable support to property claims, and to the concept of property itself.

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     A humorous anecdote about our seventh president bears upon property concepts in an illuminating way:

     In 1813, in a fight with Thomas Hart Benton and his brother Jesse, Jackson received a bullet which remained in his left arm for years. When in 1832 he finally had a surgeon remove the bullet, someone suggested giving it back to Benton, now a Senator from Missouri and a warm supporter of Jackson. Benton declined the offer, however, pointing out that twenty years' possession made the bullet Jackson's property. Told that it was only nineteen years, Benton said, "Oh, well, in consideration of the extra care he has taken of it-keeping it constantly about his person, and so on-I'll waive the odd year."
     Benton used to tell people: "General Jackson was a very great man. I shot him, sir." "Yes," he liked to say, "I had a fight with Jackson. A fellow was hardly in the fashion who didn't."

     [Paul F. Boller Jr., Presidential Anecdotes]

     That was “adverse possession law” as it applied to movable property in the Nineteenth Century. Twenty years’ adverse possession of an object was held to transfer the property rights over that object to the adverse possessor. But even that long a duration had to be supported by testimony: usually the testimony of the previous owner.

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     When European colonists arrived in the New World, they brought the concept of property with them. The Amerinds lacked any such concept. Thus, when the settlers started staking out tracts for themselves and farming them, nearby Amerind tribes didn’t automatically accept that those tracts were “owned.” They felt free to forage the farmed tracts of the Europeans, for in their minds land could never be owned by an individual. At most it was a tribal possession, and not all Amerind tribes accepted that. That was the source of many of the early grievances between the two peoples.

     The establishment of land registries and officials to supervise and maintain them was the settlers’ response... but once again, the Amerinds failed to accept land claims. “Writing? Paper? What is this magic with which you seek to confound us?” Not until European supremacy in war over the Amerind tribes had been conclusively demonstrated did the survivors bend the knee to the new concept.

     So it appears that until writing and record-keeping – the basis of history – should emerge, the seemingly natural concept of property will be slow to gain acceptance... indeed, if it’s accepted at all.