§ 770.020.Property Transferred Under Name Other Than Name In Which Property Acquired Or Stands of Record

Property records often show a name change somewhere along the chain of title — a woman who married and transferred property under her married name after acquiring it under her maiden name, or someone who used a nickname on one document and a full legal name on another. Left alone, that mismatch can look like a break in the chain of title, even though no real dispute over ownership exists.

Section 770.020 addresses exactly that gap. It authorizes a proceeding — not a lawsuit against an adverse claimant, but a proceeding to establish a fact — letting a court adjudicate and determine that the person named in an earlier link of the title and the person named in a later link are one and the same. That is narrower than the general quiet title action in Chapter 4 (§ 760.010 and following), which resolves competing claims to ownership; this article resolves an identity question that would otherwise leave a title technically clouded even when no one disputes who owns the property.