Memory Lane

The real estate market may be slipping, but there’s still plenty going on at the registry of deeds. June will be a very busy month behind the scenes with a variety of projects, papers and presentations all coming due. While preparing one of these earlier today I began listing the major events that have shaped the registry during the past ten years. Here’s my list, roughly in chronological order but without any comment or analysis. That will have to come later. (1) creating a Customer Service Department where all incoming calls, mail, and walk-in customers make their first contact with the registry; (2) completing the “10 year index” project, which added grantor index entries from 1976 to 1986 to the Wang computer system; (3) the state legislature abolished insolvent Middlesex County, making the registry of deeds a division of the Secretary of State’s office; (4) with a nearly limitless source of funding for Y2K preparations, we not only made our increasingly obsolete Wang computer system Y2K compliant, but we also added state of the art servers, cabling, and a variety of scanners, printers and computers that formed the backbone of today’s registry, (5) we hired a company to scan microfilm of all documents recorded since 1950, giving us 50 years worth of document images on our computer system; (6) we launched lowelldeeds.com, an interactive website that gave users access to all document images over the Internet at no charge; (7) the Registers of Deeds Association adopted Massachusetts Deed Indexing Standards; (8) we installed the ACS computer system, successfully converting all our old proprietary format Wang data; (9) we established a link to masslandrecords.com, the state’s website for land records which is instantly updated with new recordings and which has revolutionized the way customers use the registry; (10) we converted our Grantor Indexes from 1951 to 1976 into electronic books and distributed them on CDs, giving us 55 years of Grantor Index coverage. There are many more, but ten seems