Notes

The largest phase of the 1941-1950 “Grantor Index Imaging” project is done. Two tasks remain… quality checking the images and verifying for completeness. The free CD’s of this index should be available in the next few weeks…just in time to give away as a stocking stuffer.

Since the bulk of ‘41-50 is complete we have begun the 1926-1940 Index. This project is going well also…as of today we have finished about 40% of the images.

And…
more on Grantor Index Imaging…while these two indexes are in process a registry employee has begun preparing the next index (1916-1925) for imaging… so, actually we are working on three indexes at the same time…each at a different stage.

The Probate Indexes from 1648 to 1939 have been taken off their shelves and brought to the Plan Department…also, our old Atlases are now off the shelves and in the Plan Department (these include various Atlases of Massachusetts, the City of Lowell, Middlesex County, Lock and Canals etc). The decision to move these rare, irreplaceable books is long overdue. To avoid any inconvenience to the public both the Probate Indexes and the Atlas are “immediately” available on request.

For the past two weeks we have had a “minor” problem with the new Probate computer connection…Simply put…after ten minutes of inactivity the computer went to “sleep” then required a password to logon. Of course, we don’t have the manpower to have someone running to the record hall every ten minutes to reboot it… We believe we have solved this problem…this morning we swapped our internal computer (which doesn’t require a logon) with the public one…this should work.

In a related topic…we are in the halls often… but please, if you see a logged off computer let us know.

We awarded a new public copier contract last week…the new copiers should be arriving in about a month. In the last ten years this area has seen major changes. Since over computer system now holds approximately 90% of our images (with more being added every day) the public copiers get less and less use.

Coming Wednesday…a Thanksgiving Quiz…There is still time to brush-up.