Here is the opinion in O’Brien v. Town of Huntington, decided by the N.Y. Appellate Division. It involves a 125-acre parcel that the Town never knew it owned (allegedly) from colonial times to the 1970s. Now everyone’s suing for it, and the loser is the claimant who traces title back to a 17th century purchase from Indians. Hah!

An excerpt:

In any event, no evidence was adduced that Powell had consent from the defendants to acquire title to any of their land covered by royal patents. As indicated, by obtaining possessory rights from Native Americans in the seventeenth century, one did not acquire legally cognizable title (see Town of Oyster Bay v Stehli, 169 App Div 257, affd 221 NY 515). Moreover, the 1696 resolution only provided Powell with license to obtain further possessory rights from the Native Americans and, as such, did not confer fee title to the subject land. Even the plaintiffs’ experts conceded that this was not a deed, but rather a “license to purchase.” To the extent that such “license” creates ambiguity in title, it should be resolved in favor of the defendants’ retention of title (see People v New York & Staten Is. Ferry Co., 68 NY 71). Thus, it cannot be concluded that Powell acquired title to the subject tract of land which allegedly bulged over from Oyster Bay into the Town land and which had been granted to the defendants by the English Crown. Such a significant gap in the plaintiffs’ chain of title defeats their claim in the face of the defendants’ proof that the disputed property is part of the colonial land grants given to the Board of Trustees in the seventeenth century.