Memorial Books

This series consists of the Registrar General’s Office (RGO) Memorial Books, which recorded evidence of land sales under the pre-Torrens General Law system.

Each Memorial has the same basic sections of information:

• Date of Instrument
• Type of Instrument: Conveyance, Mortgage etc.
• Parties involved, sometimes including the addresses and occupations
• Land Description, sometimes including a metes and bounds description or diagram
• Consideration paid
• Recitals, including death dates and probates and how consideration was paid and to which of the parties
• Registration date

The first land tenure system to be introduced into Victoria in March 1838 was called the 'General Law' or 'Old Law System', or more commonly called today, NUA (Not Under Act). Land under the Torrens system (Real Property Act 1862) was therefore 'under Act'. This system was directly based on the principles of the English Common Law. 

Under the General Law system, land ownership was based on a set of deeds, being the original deed held by the owner and a Memorial which was generally registered at the RGO. These documents helped prove ownership back to the original Crown Grant, although there was no compulsion under this system to register the Memorial with the RGO.

A Memorial is a copy of the original deed. The registered Memorial had various forms which could all be used to demonstrate the chain of ownership of a piece of land. They could be Conveyances (transfers of ownership), Mortgages, Discharge of Mortgages, Creation of Easements, Charges, Discharge of Charges, Wills, Probates and some other miscellaneous dealings.

Memorials could be registered with the RGO under section 6 of the Property Law Act 1958. At the time of registration, a deed or document was allocated a registration number, commonly known as the ‘book and page number’ or ‘book/page’ which was often used as a summary way of referring to the Deed/Memorial within the books. The original deeds were copied into the Memorial books.

Title was proven by producing the collection of deeds, which was commonly called the ‘Chain of Title’ held by successive owners, as well as a search of the Memorials lodged at the RGO. Every time land changed hands, the chain of deeds needed to be produced and a new deed/Memorial needed to be drawn up by lawyers. It was a cumbersome and expensive system, in which the risk of deeds being lost or destroyed was high. Land ownership in the General Law system was and is still not guaranteed by the Victorian Government.

Although the expectation was that all land would be brought under the operation of the Transfer of Land Act fairly quickly, this did not prove to be the case. In the mid-1980s, after 120 years of operation of the Torrens system, large areas of land remained under the General Law system. The registration of Memorials continued until the 31 December 1998 when the register was closed. This was an effort to help speed up the Conversion process, as all new land transactions would have to be conducted under the Transfer of Land Act following an application to convert the deed into a certificate of title.