Happy Anniversary

Today is the 10th anniversary of my tenure as Register of Deeds. Shortly after 4:00 p.m. on January 5, 1995, Superior Court Clerk Edward Sullivan administered the oath of office to me as Register and to Tony Accardi as Assistant Register. It’s hard to believe that we’ve been here for that long. In 1995, the registry had 35 employees, a budget of $1.35 million, and 60,000 documents were recorded. Now, we have 26 employees, a budget of $1.24 million, and in this past year recorded 96,204 documents for this registry plus another 48,784 at our Middlesex South satellite office for a total of 144,988. In 1995, there were four computer terminals that could, if you were willing to wait a couple of minutes, display one on the handful of document images that had been scanned. Back then, the index began with 1987, so you had eight years available on the computer. Now, every document from 1950 to the present (more than 5 million pages) is available 24 hours per day, seven days per week on our website. The searchable index has been pushed back to 1976 and our “index on CD” goes back to 1951. (That’s right, we’ve scanned grantor index books from 1951 to 1975 and have those books available on a set of four CDs for the bargain price of four blank CDs – more on this later this week). Anyway, thanks to everyone who helped make these past ten years so enjoyable and rewarding. I must single out Assistant Register Tony Accardi for special recognition. Everything that we’ve done has been a complete team effort; without Tony’s help, it would not have been possible.