LowellDeeds

One reason our record books remain valuable to registry users is the presence of marginal references within their pages. These notations are the book and page numbers of related documents that were written in the margin - hence the name "marginal references" - some time after the record book was created. The most obvious example is when a mortgage is paid off. A discharge of the mortgage is recorded and placed in a new record book. In the past, a registry employee would go to the book where the mortgage being discharged was located, open the book to that mortgage, and write in the margin "see discharge at Book 1234, Page 567." That way, when someone looked at the mortgage, they would immediately see from the marginal reference the location of the discharge of that mortgage. Information about the discharge was entered in the Grantor and Grantee Indexes, but the primary means of finding the discharge was by the marginal reference on the mortgage. Eventually, computers that created a type of hyperlink from document to document made this whole marginal reference concept obsolete. But those scribblings in the margins of record books remain valuable which is why we've spent many hours capturing marginal references from years past. Soon this data will be imported into our current computer system which will cause related documents that were recorded years ago to be linked electronically.