When you own property you get a deed to it which registered with usual the town or county and on it the deed has your name.
And as any trans person knows, when you sell or buy property you have to have the signature notarized. So you need all your ducks in a row.
First thing first, name change, hi ho, it is off to court I go! I filled out the forms and I went before the judge. Do you swear that you… I got as many copies of the probate order that I could. So down to the town hall with the my deed to my house… paid $150 and my legal name is now on the deed.
When my parents passed away my brother and me inherited the property, but (you always know that there is a but.) the New Hampshire cottage had my male name on it!
Then when I was in New Hampshire I called the country clerk’s office to find out how to do that in NH, the clerk when I told her what I wanted to do she huffed and said you just to that on a deed you have to have a lawyer get a probate order to change the name on a deed! So I left my male name on the deed.
To this day I think what she told me because of me being trans, I think that it is probably like it is in Connecticut you just need a copy of the probate court name change and fill out some form.
So that means when we sell the cottage ten years later I have to do the name change on the deed at the sale.
Shortly after my father died we sold their house but this was before I transitioned so all the names were legally correct, no problems, just sign the deed over to the new owner. Then their lawyer said that the secretary and used the feminine form of my name! Now I was out to my brother, and our lawyer (who I knew from a trans support group) was a friend from a support group so they both knew I was in the process of transitioning we three kind looked at one another… Hun?
Now you have to remember that I am from a small town, so their lawyer lived two houses down from my parents house, the family that we were selling it to was the daughter that I went to school with K-12 and they lived on the street behind us (The husband has guts moving to be neighbors with your in-laws).
My brother, our lawyer, and me all started laughing when we got out of the lawyer’s office, did he know that I’m trans? Was it a simple mistake? Or did the whole neighborhood know that I crossdressed?
I had one other run in with the courts, a couple of years after my father died I found out that he had a life insurance policy that as executor of his estate I had to process but it had my male name on it. So back to probate court I went, it was the same judge that did my name change and he remembered me. He said no problem he gave a court order kind of like DBA (Doing Business As) and he waive the fee.
When I bought the cottage on the Cape it was over fifteen years since I transitioned so there is no problem with my documentation, so hopefully I will have no problems with the probate court.
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