A Beverly house bought in 1962 stays in the family, after a lawyer untangled forty years of paperwork

The brick bungalow on a quiet street in Beverly has had the same family in it since 1962. Last month, for the first time in sixty-four years, it changed hands, and it stayed exactly where it was.

The owner, 89, bought the house with her husband the year they married. When he died in 1991 nobody retitled it, which is common and usually harmless until the day it is not. That day came in 2025, when she decided to sell to her granddaughter and discovered the county's records still showed two owners, one of them thirty-four years dead.

"It sounds simple. It wasn't," said Grace O'Donnell, the Hale & Mercer LLP associate who took the matter. "There was an estate that was never opened, a 1987 refinancing with a typo in the legal description, and an easement from the 1970s that everyone had forgotten. Forty years of paper, and every sheet had to agree."

O'Donnell, 30, grew up four blocks away; her grandfather was a Chicago police sergeant and her mother a court reporter. "I read the 1962 deed aloud to her at the kitchen table so she'd know exactly what it said," she said. "She corrected my pronunciation of the street."

The granddaughter, a nurse at Little Company of Mary, closed in July. Her grandmother will stay in the house with her. "The paperwork is boring right up until the day it's the only thing that matters," O'Donnell said. "This was that day."

Hale & Mercer and the Irish American Heritage Center run a free wills-and-powers-of-attorney clinic on the second Saturday of each month. O'Donnell volunteers there. "If you have ever thought 'I should sort out the house paperwork,'" she said, "this is the sign."