LowellDeeds

This coming weekend is the Lowell Folk Festival - the largest free folk festival in the United States - six outdoor stages, three days of traditional music and dance, street parades, ethnic food of all types.  For more information, check out their website at www.lowellfolkfestival.org.  I hope to see you there.  Some more news from yesterday's ACS Users Group meeting: There's a growing trend among registry users to attach a variety of documents to the end of another document being recorded (attaching a death certificate to a deed, for example).  It seems that most registries will treat this "packet" as a single document and charge only the fee for the primary document.  In this case, however, nothing contained in the attached documents will be entered in the index.  If the customer wants the attached documents to also be indexed, they will be treated as separate documents and charged accordingly.  Another issue discussed was the presence of social security numbers on documents presented for recording.  Because everything is now on the Internet, including social security numbers on documents creates a risk of identify theft, so most registries will not record social security numbers (we ask the person recording the document to cross them out).  Of course, this rule doesn't apply to tax liens.  Apparently, the taxing authorities have concluded that people who don't pay their taxes on time don't need to have their social security numbers protected.  Finally, the registries have asked ACS for a better way to index property that resides in more than one community.  Right now, we use the town code "Multiple" for such properties, but if you try to search for such a property and limits the search to one or the other town names, you won't find anything because the town code is Multiple.  (That's why we advise people to use the minimum information possible when starting searches - you can always make it more restrictive if too many results are returned).