House History Research Seminar

This coming Thursday, December 20, 2018, at 12:30 pm at the Tewksbury Public Library, 300 Chandler Street, Tewksbury, I will give a talk on how to research the history of your home using Registry of Deeds records. The talk is free and will last an hour with plenty of time for questions.

The Middlesex North Registry of Deeds is the depository of all records related to the ownership of land in Billerica, Carlisle, Chelmsford, Dracut, Dunstable, Lowell, Tewksbury, Tyngsborough, Westford and Wilmington from the first document recorded in 1629 up until this moment. All 14 million pages of those records have been scanned and are freely available for viewing, downloading and printing on the registry's website, www.lowelldeeds.com.  

At this talk, I will explain how registry of deeds records are organized and will provide helpful hints on how to use them most effectively.

Public access to government records

There's a great story in today's Globe about Jay and DeLene Holbrook, a seventy-something couple from Oxford, Massachusetts who have spent the last 30 year collecting, organizing and microfilming the vital records of every city and town in the Commonwealth.  Mr. Holbrook was a historical demographer who began the project as part of an academic assignment and then continued it as a business with his spouse's assistance.  They would persuade town clerks, one-by-one, to allow them to borrow their books and then take the books to a commercial microfilming service where the records would be photographed.  In return for the loan of the books, the Holbrook's would provide each town with a free copy of that town's microfilm.  Recently, the Holbrooks sold their collection to Ancestry.com which has converted the records from microfilm to digital images and has integrated them into the Ancestry database. 

While it's true that the original version of these records are (or are supposed to be) freely available to the public for review and research at each town hall, having them indexed and available online as digital images adds tremendously to their value. 

Tracing the Family Tree

We’ve recently had an upsurge in customer requests for assistance in conducting genealogical research. While we’re happy to help, our resources in that area are somewhat limited. The critical issue is whether the researchers ancestors owned real estate. Many Lowell residents through the years lived their lives not as property owners but as tenants and would not have left any imprint in our records. If an ancient relative was a property owner, however, we can certainly be of assistance.

Just this morning I assisted a researcher who knew that her great grandfather lived at a particular address in the 1880s but knew nothing of her great grandmother. After a few minutes of digging, we not only discovered the great grandmother’s name, we also learned that she was the sole owner of the property. As we traced the ownership history of the property through the years, it passed from generation to generation of the same family with enough sales to allow us to keep sight of the parcel. Inferences drawn from the simple language of these deeds painted a family portrait of marriages, deaths and relationships.

For those interested in genealogy or in any historical property research, obtaining an electronic copy of our pre-1976 indexes is essential. The entire index from 1976 to the present is already available in searchable form on our website and all document images and plans beginning with the very first one from 1629 are also on the website, but only by book and page number. The index for documents recorded between 1629 and 1976 is available in electronic form at the registry, but not on the internet. To remedy this virtual gap in our holdings, we provide customers with a free electronic copy of these older indexes. All you need is a 16GB flash drive (aka “thumb drive”) which can be purchased for about $30 from Walmart, Staples or a host of other stores. Bring that drive to the registry and 15 minutes later you have a complete copy of our index.

Another thing that would be helpful (but does not yet exist) would be something like a “lay person’s guide to current and past Massachusetts property law.” Those of us who deal with property law ever day know that it defies logic and easy explanation, so a booklet explaining the basic principles would be most helpful.