§ 16.023.Tacking of Successive Interests

One sentence that makes the adverse possession periods achievable in practice.

To satisfy a limitations period, peaceable and adverse possession does not need to continue in the same person — but there must be privity of estate between each holder and his successor.

Without tacking, ten-year adverse possession would almost never succeed. Land changes hands, people die, families sell. Requiring one individual to hold for the whole period would defeat most claims for reasons unconnected to the merits.

Privity of estate is the limit, and it is a real one. Each holder must have passed possession to the next by some connecting transaction — a deed, a will, an inheritance, a contract of sale. A stranger who moves onto land another squatter abandoned starts at zero.

The distinction is between a chain and a coincidence. The chain need not be a valid chain of title — an adverse possessor by definition has none — but there must be a link that shows the later holder took from the earlier one.

An interruption in possession itself is a different problem, and this section does not cure it. Possession must remain peaceable and adverse throughout; a period during which the true owner retook the land, or the possession stopped being adverse, breaks the run whoever was holding.

The section says "each holder and his successor", so the requirement applies at every link. A single break in a chain of four holders defeats the whole accumulation, and the clock runs only from the unbroken portion that follows.

Read it with the definition of peaceable possession in the subchapter’s definitions section, which is what the accumulated time must satisfy.