My dad sold a ranch in 1961 and in the 1980s he was contacted because when the people he sold to began the process to sell it there was a little piece of it that was still in my dad’s name. It was pretty odd, he signed off on it with no issue to help them settle it because as he told the man he intended to sell him the whole ranch and it was just an error at the clerk’s office when it was recorded. I often wonder how much that used to happen years ago. The man was lucky my dad was honest and willing to just sign off on it to correct the error; it could have been a legal mess I imagine.
The entire industry of title insurance is built around how poor the records are. It’s still happening, records traces can be complicated as people divide and combine parcel, and mean to combine parcels but don’t get all the i’s dotted (probably what happened in this case). And parcels get abandoned, my grandmother had bough some “spec” land in New Mexico that civilization was going to grow to any day, 30 years later she dies we poke around on the internet trying to decide if the land is worth anything, find the entire “development” is in a state of chaotic nothing where things are still being sold and nothing built, and town is still 20 miles away, so we just say “forget it” and toss the deeds. Someday someone will hate us for that.