Deed Dish is a database of documents describing the chain of title for properties in Chicago. The website provides a simple interface for exploring property ownership and getting the "dish" about a property's deeds.
Use the mouse to explore and interact with the map. Clicking on a parcel (blue) will highlight that parcel and load the deed history for it on the Parcel Information panel. Each deed has an associated document number (in blue), date of execution, deed type, consideration amount, and list of grantees. If a grantee name is orange, clicking on it will highlight other parcels on the map where that name has shown up in the property's deed history. Clicking on a document number will bring you to a copy of the original document that the data was collected from.
The idea behind Deed Dish started back in 2020, when I came across the Cook County Recordings website while doing research in graduate school. Other research I had been reading focused on using data from county assessors' offices to explore property history and ownership. Deeds and other legal documents provide a rich collection of data for exploring a building's history, and so I built this tool as a proof of concept as part of my time at the Recurse Center.
Data for this project is scraped from the Cook County Recorder's website and Cook County's open data portal, Cook Central.
The website may be experiencing a lot of traffic. If you try again in a minute you should have better luck.
I'm Ethan Jantz, a software engineer based out of Chicago. Learn more about me and my work at jantz.website. If you want to talk to me about this project you can reach me here.
Currently, Deed Dish only contains records for parcels in the Logan Square, Avondale, Humboldt Park, and West Town community areas.