Definition
"Convey any real estate or personal" is a phrase of legal art appearing in early American instruments — chiefly agreements, covenants, wills, and acts of incorporation — where it operates as a term of operative legal transfer. The phrase is typically understood as an incomplete fragment of a longer clause, most commonly "convey any real estate or personal estate" or "convey any real estate or personal property," with the trailing noun elided or cut short in transcription. As a whole unit, the phrase signals the scope of a grantor's or testator's power or obligation to transfer interests across both categories of property — real and personal — in a single instrument or provision.
The phrase thus carries two component meanings that must be read together:
(1) CONVEY: To transfer an interest in property from one party to another by deed, instrument, or legal act. In early American usage, "convey" was most naturally associated with real property transfers, though courts regularly construed it to reach personal property when the surrounding context demanded.
(2) REAL ESTATE OR PERSONAL [ESTATE/PROPERTY]: A comprehensive pairing intended to capture the full universe of a party's transferable assets — land and fixed improvements on one side, movable goods, choses in action, and other personal interests on the other.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Convey" in ordinary English means to transport or communicate something from one place or person to another. "Real estate" is commonly understood as land and buildings. "Personal" as an adjective connotes something private or individual.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Convey" meant to carry or transport; also, in legal use, to transfer property by deed or writing. "Personal" could mean of or relating to a particular person, or in legal context, relating to movable property as distinguished from real property.
The gap is meaningful. In ordinary speech, "convey" suggests physical movement or communication. In legal instruments, it is a precise term of art for effecting a property transfer — it creates or passes a legal interest. The phrase "real estate or personal" similarly has no natural common-language analogue; the pairing exists solely as a legal shorthand for the full scope of a party's property, and a reader unfamiliar with the real/personal property distinction will miss the operative force of the phrase entirely.
---
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase is most valuable to researchers as a term of construction — courts in early New York practice were frequently asked what a drafter meant by including or omitting it, and the cases collected by Rapalje & Lawrence represent a small but pointed body of interpretive law.
Several research traps apply:
First, the phrase almost never appears in isolation. It is a fragment, and its legal meaning depends entirely on the instrument in which it appears — an agreement, a covenant, a will, or a corporate charter each triggers a different interpretive frame. The Rapalje & Lawrence entry organizes its cases by instrument type (agreement, covenant to convey, will, act of incorporation), and researchers should follow that structure when searching historical digests.
Second, the word "convey" carried a narrower technical meaning in early practice than it does today. In some early New York cases, courts had to determine whether "convey" extended to personal estate at all, given its primary association with real property transfers by deed. The answer depended heavily on surrounding language and evident intent.
Third, the truncation of the phrase — the missing terminal noun — is itself a historical research problem. Manuscript records, early print digests, and headnotes frequently abbreviate or corrupt instrument language. Researchers encountering "convey any real estate or personal" in a source should check whether the original instrument reads "personal estate," "personal property," or some other completion, as the choice of noun could affect how courts assessed the scope of the transfer.
Fourth, jurisdictional context is essential. The cases in the Rapalje & Lawrence entry are uniformly drawn from New York — Wendell, Johnson, and Cowen reporters — and reflect the interpretive habits of early New York courts specifically. Do not assume this construction would be read identically in other states or under English authority.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence (1883) treats this phrase not as a standalone entry but as a cluster of construction cases organized by instrument type. The entry groups authority under "ESTATE IN THEIR POSSESSION (in the act of incorporation of a bank)" and "CONVEY LAND (in an agreement)," then separately addresses covenant and will contexts. This organizational choice is itself instructive: the compilers recognized that the operative meaning of the phrase shifted depending on whether it appeared in a corporate charter, a bilateral agreement, a covenant running with land, or a testamentary instrument.
The sources cited — 5 Wendell 590, 10 Johnson 297, 6 Cowen 13, 3 Wendell 249, and 3 Johnson Cases 174 — are all early nineteenth-century New York reporters, reflecting a period in which New York courts were actively working out the reach of conveyancing language imported from English practice into an American statutory and common-law environment. The entry does not synthesize these cases into a rule; it simply catalogs them, leaving the doctrinal work to the researcher. No general treatise authority is cited, and no English cases are referenced, which suggests the phrase's interpretive history in American law was developing independently of English sources by this period.
What Rapalje & Lawrence does not address: the phrase's treatment in equity (where courts of chancery could compel conveyance regardless of form), the effect of recording acts on the scope of "convey," or any post-1883 statutory development that may have absorbed or displaced the common-law construction questions the cases addressed.
---
Jurisdictional Note
The entire body of authority behind this phrase, as collected in Rapalje & Lawrence, is drawn from early New York reporters. Researchers working in other jurisdictions should treat these cases as persuasive background at most and should investigate whether their jurisdiction's early courts addressed similar construction questions under analogous instrument language.
---