Acquiring land in Britain's first colony 'was a free-for-all'
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“Under the registry system there’s just a government depository of documents, and everything goes in there. … Every record of anything to do with land goes into this registry,” he said. “It’s up to lawyers when land is bought and sold to sift through the registry and find any related deeds. Our registry goes back to 1820, but history goes back much farther than that. By the time we had a registry, a government and a court system, people had been here for 200 years without interference.
With rural parts of the province being poor and fishermen being paid in stock and trade by merchants, people didn’t have money to buy land or houses. The current law in Newfoundland and Labrador cuts off squatter's rights against the Crown as of Jan. 1, 1977, with the only exception being that people can keep land they occupied for the 20 years before the law changed.
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