In times gone by, our grand­par­ents and great-grand­par­ents un­der­stood the con­cept of in­vest­ing in land. There were many old­er ones who would al­ways ad­vise that “land don’t rot­ten”.

Their be­lief that land was a good in­vest­ment led to the pur­chase of acres of land, not like the one lot we are now con­strained to pur­chase due to cur­rent mar­ket prices. These acres of land would some­times be­come huge fam­i­ly com­pounds with sib­lings be­ing gift­ed var­i­ous por­tions to oc­cu­py with their fam­i­lies. The bound­aries of which were on­ly known by word of mouth, but not doc­u­ment­ed any­where. But, in those days, fam­i­ly was fam­i­ly; in these mod­ern days, fam­i­ly doesn’t car­ry the same mean­ing.

Our great-grand­par­ents are long gone and many of us no longer have grand­par­ents. What we are left with are deeds for acres of land that ei­ther al­ready con­tain the names of all the per­sons liv­ing on the land or in need of pro­bate. This is where the new-fan­gled mean­ing of fam­i­ly is usu­al­ly on full dis­play. Sud­den­ly, with the death of the fam­i­ly ma­tri­arch or pa­tri­arch, the per­sons to ben­e­fit from the in­vest­ed acres for­get about the un­der­stood bound­ary lines, about the fam­i­ly that peace­ful­ly shared their an­ces­tors’ in­vest­ment and, sud­den­ly, a fight en­sues for every ex­tra inch, foot and lot.