I'm trying to find, online, plans of certain former Middlesex County, MA county road layouts from the 1950s. FYI for those in other parts of the country, Middlesex is one of several Massachusetts counties which pretty much abolished their governments in the 1990s (and Connecticut abolished all its county governments in 1960).
It looks like the Middlesex County Commissioners were recording road layout plans with the Middlesex South Registry of Deeds at least as far back as 1964, but that's as far back as plans have been indexed for online searching by name ("Middlesex County Commissioners") or town. I suspect that earlier road layout plans have been digitized and are on the website, and can be accessed if you know the year and plan number, but the trick is finding the plan number. All of the references I've seen to old county road layouts say simply "County Layout of 1954," for example.
Does anyone know of a source, other than the Registry, for an index of year and plan numbers for these layouts from the 1950s? Or is there a better source than the Registry for the layouts themselves (that doesn't require driving into Cambridge ????)?
I've looked at the MassDOT website but have found info only for much newer, state roads. I also found an index on the umass.edu website, but only for Hampshire County.
Thanks!
Middlesex used to mail out a CD for a fee that had additional scanned plans and docs which are not available on the website.?ÿ I haven't seen them pop up elsewhere on their site but you may still need to get the CD from them.?ÿ The CD had scans of the street indexes as well as a record book index which is very helpful in finding the plan of plan year info on a plan.
Thank you for that tip! I’d think that these days any digital info they could put on a CD could just as easily be put on the Web. But, it is the State. I will check.
Hi,
?ÿ
I recently contacted Middlesex South by email for advice on how to obtain a County Layout from 1931 in Townsend, Massachusetts. They were very helpful and quickly sent me a JPEG image of the layout by email free. You can imagine that I was pleasantly surprised. They saved me a long trip to Cambridge.
Middlesex South Registry Of Deeds
Plans Department
208 Cambridge Street, 4th?ÿFloor
Cambridge, MA 02141
T 617-679-6326
http://www.middlesexsouthregistry.com/&source=gmail&ust=1579269145801000&usg=AFQjCNF10e5-uJTOJmpVSuLnL1_jrg1Y6 A">www.middlesexsouthregistry.com
If you do a lot of work in Middlesex, it is worth the time to drive in to Cambridge (or request by mail) and get the latest CD of Middlesex County Engineering Department records. As dgm-pls noted, the CD also has scans of the county layout index, other county plans index, railroad layout plans (not ValMaps, the original route layouts). The CD also has scans of Registry of Deeds records that are not available on line: plans recorded in Plan Books, plans recorded within the Deed Books, plans recorded as Filed Plans (Middlesex Registry?ÿ used a number of different plan indexing systems over the years, only those recorded by the "Plan No. _ of Year" system is available on line). Perhaps most valuable to me is the scan of the "Plan Log 1928-2003", which cross-referenced the "Plan No. _ of Year" system with the "Deed Book _ Page_ system of recording. A lot of deeds reference the plans by Book and Page, but you need Plan No. and Year to get the plan on line.
Worcester County Registry acquired the records of the Worcester County Engineering Dept. They also have scans of those records available if you go in and bring a thumb drive. (Call ahead and ask if this is still true, that info is few years old).
Thank you for that information! I might give that a try for the plan that's of most interest right now. By the way, the link in your post appears garbled and none of the edits I've tried have worked (all give "not found" errors from the website).
Thank you, Peter. I'm definitely going to get that CD! And thanks too for the tip about Worcester County.
Sorry, I copied that information from their email. If you use an Internet search for masslandrecords.com it will work better.
Was the link supposed to be simply for the masslandrecords / Middlesex South main page? I was wondering if it was to something specific within the website (i.e. something interesting that I'd never noticed on the website). Thanks again!
Ok a link that was in the email sent to me me did not work. I wrote to the email given on masslandrecords.com page for South Middlesex. They replied to me shortly thereafter.
Follow up: I've left a voicemail for supposedly the correct person at the Registry to get the CD that @dgm-pls?ÿand @peter-lothian mentioned. And in the meantime, I emailed the address that @not-my-real-name shared asking about obtaining electronic copies of two particular 1950s road layout plans. I sent the email at 12:34 PM EST, and the response came back at 1:00 PM EST, containing high-resolution JPGs of three sheets each of those two plans (and a note to mail a check for $18). Wow, amazing for a government office, and at lunchtime to boot! I sent a "thank you!" email.
Thanks again for the help, guys.
If you find any problems with the online index or documents at masslandrecords.com the folks at the state office are pretty quick to fix those issues, too.
That's nice to know. I do find indexing errors (typically an off-by-one-page) from time to time. I think I've also found one or two in which a name search didn't find a document that was findable by other searches, and clearly should have been findable by name.
