Dowling v. Heirs of Bond

Citations

• 345 Conn. 119

Syllabus

The plaintiff landowner sought to quiet title to an abutting parcel of real property, to which the defendant O Co. held record title. The plaintiff's shorefront property, which was located on a peninsula protruding into Long Island Sound, had been owned by the B family for nearly seventy- five years before the plaintiff purchased it. The deed conveying the property to the plaintiff identifies the abutting parcel, which is forty feet wide and bound to the south by Long Island Sound, as a right of way. O Co., a nonprofit organization formed to promote the interests of certain property owners on the peninsula, had acquired title to the parcel and other rights of way to the shoreline in the 1970s. The plaintiff and her husband, during their plans to expand the house on the property, began to investigate the property's prior ownership and retained various attorneys, including M, to research whether the B family had acquired title to the parcel by adverse possession and to pursue that claim. M recommended that the plaintiff file a notice of her claim of adverse possession on the land records pursuant to a provision (§ 47-33f) of the Marketable Title Act (§ 47-33b et seq.) to ensure that O Co. did not attempt to extinguish her claim under the act. M also sent a letter analyzing the factual and legal grounds for and against the claim, in which M ultimately concluded that the plaintiff had acquired title to the parcel by adverse possession. Thereafter, the plaintiff recorded a notice of claim on the land records of the town in which her property and the parcel were located, claiming a fee interest in the parcel by virtue of adverse possession. In the present quiet title action, the plaintiff alleged that her predecessors in title had used and possessed the parcel for more than fifteen years in an open, visible, notorious, adverse, exclusive, continuous and uninterrupted manner such that the predecessors in title, and, through them, the plaintiff, had acquired title to the pa