Lowell Deeds

One reason our record books remain valuable to registry users is the presence of marginal references within their pages. These notations are the book and page numbers of related documents that were written in the margin - hence the name “marginal references” - some time after the record book was created. The most obvious example is when a mortgage is paid off. A discharge of the mortgage is recorded and placed in a new record book. In the past, a registry employee would go to the book where the mortgage being discharged was located, open the book to that mortgage, and write in the margin “see discharge at Book 1234, Page 567.” That way, when someone looked at the mortgage, they would immediately see from the marginal reference the location of the discharge of that mortgage. Information about the discharge was entered in the Grantor and Grantee Indexes, but the primary means of finding the discharge was by the marginal reference on the mortgage. Eventually, computers that created a type of hyperlink from document to document made this whole marginal reference concept obsolete. But those scribblings in the margins of record books remain valuable which is why we’ve spent many hours capturing marginal references from years past. Soon this data will be imported into our current computer system which will cause related documents that were recorded years ago to be linked electronically.

The Sunday Boston Globe had two related stories about busing and neighborhood schools. Comparing two Boston elementary schools, the stories compared the pros and cons of the two school assignment models. The way these stories were written, the neighborhood school seemed much better than the school attended by students who all arrived by bus. The busing story highlighted problems with buses arriving on time and drivers disputing which children were to get on the bus. In contrast, the neighborhood school spoke of the benefits of having 90% of the parents waiting at the front door each day at dismissal. This allowed teachers to hold impromptu conferences and get to know the parents better. No one would argue that when a parent has the flexibility to bring a child to and from school each day, the child benefits. But the reality is that most children come from households where both parents (or the one parent in a single parent household) work and work schedules rarely coincide with arrival and dismissal times of a child’s school. For many, putting a child on the bus and having that same bus deliver that child to a day care provider in the afternoon is a big help schedule-wise. Busing is no bargain - the millions of dollars spent on transportation could certainly be used elsewhere. But for many, the nostalgic longing for “neighborhood schools” is a search for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. For working families, a more useful discussion would involve before school and after school care and activities that would serve as affordable, safe and productive substitutes for expensive day care and stressful juggling of parental schedules to accommodate school start and end times.

Friday’s chat session featured a lively discussion about the future of record books. With images on a reliable computer system, duplicated on the Internet, the need to have physical record books available to registry users is greatly diminished. Because we stopped making books several years ago, the registry in Lowell has not experienced the pressure to find new shelf space every day. Still, the limited space we do have could be put to better use and, if a new Judicial Center is ever built in Lowell, the registry would be able to fit into a smaller space than we now occupy. Users involved in our chat session expressed a number of concerns: What happens if the computers are down? What about the marginal references that are only written in the record books but are not in the computer? When making copies, putting an open book on a copier gives you two pages for fifty cents while printing from the computer costs you $1 per page. These are all legitimate concerns. For those of you who weren’t able to join us on Friday, the blog will answer these and other book-related questions over the next few days.