Touch Screen Technology

There’s a real surge in recordings of Declarations of Homestead these days. Each day, homeowners come to the registry, fill out the form, have it notarized and record it, all of which takes less than ten minutes. Because our Homestead form requires customers to exhibit their penmanship when filling in the blanks, we can say that the state of handwriting in America is slipping. In an attempt to improve the legibility of these customer-created Homesteads, we are developing a “Homestead Maker” that uses touch screen technology. Here’s how it works: We’ve taken an old PC and written a program that prompts the user for the information necessary to complete the form such as name, address, town and book and page reference. This program causes a computer keyboard to appear on the computer’s screen. All the customer has to do is touch the letters needed to fill in the blanks and press the “print” button. A fully typed Homestead form will emerge and the customer signs it and we notarize it and record it. The prototype we’ve been experimenting with has yielded very good results, so good that we see the next step has self-contained Homestead kiosks that can be placed in town halls or libraries throughout the district.