Price v. Hudson

Citations

• 125 Ill. 284
• 17 N.E. 817

Syllabus

<p>1. Delivery of deed—how far essential. As a rule, to render a deed operative as a conveyance, an unconditional delivery is requisite, or if the delivery is conditional, or to take effect on the happening of some event in the future, it must appear that the condition has been performed or that the event has happened.</p> <p>2. Same—what constitutes a delivery—and of evidence in respect thereto. It is not essential to a delivery that the deed shall pass from the hand of the grantor to the grantee. Any disposition of the deed by the grantor, with the intention thereby to make delivery of it, so that it shall become presently effective as a conveyance of title, will, if accepted by the grantee, constitute a sufficient delivery.</p> <p>3. The intention to deliver, on the one hand, and of acceptance on the other, may be shown by direct evidence of the intention, or may be presumed from acts or declarations, or both acts and declarations, of the parties, constituting parts of the res gestæ, which manifest such intention. In like •manner the presumption of a delivery may be rebutted and overcome by proof of a contrary intention, or of acts and declarations from which the contrary presumption arises.</p> <p>4. It is not competent to control the effect of a deed by parol evidence when it has once taken effect by delivery, but it is always competent to show that the deed, although in the grantee’s hands, has never in fact been delivered, unless the grantor, or those claiming through him, are estopped in some way from asserting the non-delivery of the deed.</p> <p>5. In 1863 the grantor, before going into the army, made a deed of his land to his wife, and placed it in his trunk, to be taken by her only in case of- his death while in the army. The grantor returned in 1865, but never afterward saw the deed, and the grantee took no manual possession of it until in 1883, when she took it from the trunk, and on advice that it was ineffectual to convey title, she destroyed it: Hel