NORFOLK COUNTY REGISTRY OF DEEDS 649 High Street Dedham, Massachusetts 02026
The success of the Norfolk Registry of Deeds Internet access program has become a major asset to Norfolk County. In a few short years, the Registry has gone from having no records available to remote users to a situation where almost everything in the Registry is available over the Internet. Lawyers, title examiners, banks and other commercial entities are able to research from their busy offices, while the citizens of Norfolk County can look up his or her own deed from the comfort of their own home. The Norfolk Registry of Deeds is the holder of real estate records for the entire county of Norfolk Massachusetts. Norfolk has been in existence since 1793, when it was split off from Suffolk County to become its own entity. It is the second largest registry in the state with a total of 28 cities and towns having their records filed here. Registry revenues support many county and state programs as well as funding its own budget. Last fiscal year the Registry brought in over $53,000,000.00 for the benefit of the county and state. Off-site access was a major project that William O'Donnell embraced when he became Register of Deeds in 2002. Up to that time the registry had provided a dial-up system for real estate professionals to access the land records indexes. Indexes were available back to 1974, but there were no document images or plans accessible. Upon the introduction of a new computer system to the registry in 2003, Internet access became available but the amount of information that could be accessed was limited to the indexes and documents that had been scanned in over the past few years. The job now was to get as much as possible of the Registry information into the database. The first order of duty was to scan in thousands of documents that had been recorded prior to the new system being implemented. The number of recordings in 2002 and 2003 had overwhelmed the old system, leaving some huge backlogs of work to be done. Utilizing overtime for employees and outside vendors for extra help, the scanning backlog disappeared in about nine months. At the same time index verifying had fallen behind, and again employees put in extra time to proof about two years of documents. As 2005 arrived, the information available stretched back to the early nineties. Now it was time to start going back. The registry had the indexes back to 1974, but relatively few images. Using fairly new microfilm reels of the record books, the images were transferred to CD to be loaded into the computer. Within a few short months the images were matched up with the indexes, and all documents and indexes going back to 1974 were available. An ongoing project to go back further is continuing, and indexes and images back to 1956 will be available by July 2007. Images for all documents prior to 1956 are available now by using the book and page feature on the search screen.
While all this was being worked on, parallel programs were tackled in the Plan Department and in the Land Court section of the Registry. The plan department undertook the Herculean task of scanning all of the plans that had been recorded at the Registry to create digital images that could be made available in the computer system. Over 500 plan books and thousands of deed book plans were finally scanned in by the beginning of 2007. All plans ever recorded may be viewed, and many volumes of plan indexes and index cards were entered by the data processing staff to create a new plan index which makes it easy to find a plan. The Land Court had its own scanning problems. With over a million documents on file, there was also an expedited need to perform a multitude of back scanning and transfer of microfilm to CD in order to make all the documents available. The big challenge for Land Court was to make the certificates of Title and the Land Court plans in the large registration books available. These large page items had never been scanned, and included over 800 books of 200 certificates each with thousands of plans interspersed through the pages. Again utilizing employee overtime, outside vendors and the passage of time, we can now state that everything available to someone who is actually in the Land Court is available to the off-site researcher via the Internet. The registry has tried to utilize the latest in technology to further its core mission, which is to make the land records of Norfolk County safe, reliable and accessible to the citizens of the county and the professionals involved in real estate. Internet access has taken the information from the dusty bookshelves of the past to the computer on your desk. Documents appear in the index as they are recorded, and the images are scanned by the next business day. The Norfolk Registry of Deeds has made an important investment in new technology to make the past and present come alive for anyone interested in our history.
Contact:
Richard F. Kennedy, Jr. First Assistant Register rkennedv@norfolkdeeds.org 1-781-461-61 15