Next week we will add a new link called “what’s online?” to our website. This will explain what data is currently available on the “Search Land Records” link. It will also describe our plans to add more data to the site and will include a “helpful hints” section. For example, one of the most common reasons people fail to find documents is that they add too much information to the search screen. Each thing you enter is one more restriction on the search, so the more fields you populate, the greater the chance that you will exclude the document you are looking for. When searching by name, for instance, just enter the last name and the first few letters of the first name. Forget middle initials, document types, towns, and date range. If your search returns hundreds of documents, then you can methodically start limiting the search. Unless it’s a big land owner or a developer, however, the entries returned should be a manageable number. Entering a town in a search may cause a big problem, because documents such as attachments and federal and state tax liens apply to all property, so the registry enters “none” for the town code. If you limit your search to documents that have “Lowell” as the town code, you would not find an attachment or tax lien. Sorry if this is the first time you’re hearing this. We don’t mean to ruin your Thanksgiving, but this is just an example of the type of information that will soon be readily available on the website.
