Anyone else having issues with newly scanned record documents? I'm reconsidering my enthusiasm for them. I don't know the solution, but I sure want my old index books back, even when I have to trip over to the vault to look at them.
I read a lot of complaints about title companies on these pages. I must be lucky to live in an area where the title companies are better than the average. Nowadays I work exclusively in one county. I can download deeds from the county recorders website, no charge, going back to 1978. I've always been able to get copies of single deeds just by sending an emailed request to a title company. If I need a complete title report, with links to all the relevant deeds, the charge will be $350. Which is cheaper than a half days work getting to and from the courthouse and doing the work myself. Especially where I might be going through grantor/grantee indexes going back to 1923 to find the vesting deed for a property my city acquired.
So sometimes the quality of the scans leaves something to be desired. More often than not that is caused by the quality of the original.
I don't know what my OP has to do with title companies, they are probably the only place I can go to finish research. I don't have any problems with local title companies, they are very helpful.
The vault has missing documents that exist but don't show up in the scanned record index. Since there are no longer index books available there is no way to find the documents. I recently was researching a parcel and was able to track the history to 2002 when a corrective deed was done, after that date there are no more index book entries for the section until an Affidavit in 2016. In that Affidavit it references two additional deeds by book and page. Those deeds don't show up on the computer index, but they were filed between 2002-2016. I was able to get them once I knew they exist and told the county they are missing from the scan index. It's a big problem. How many others are in limbo like those two?
Local title companies seem to have back-door ways of finding records.
@mightymoe What he said. It really helps to be on first-name basis with the title companies. If a scanned document is not legible our recorder will provide a pristine copy for a buck or two. Generally, I could download from the recorder for free and legible enough for what I needed.
Illegible documents and missing entries in the index are recording process errors.
The clerk and recorder's office should add a couple of steps to their procedure to ensure legible scanned documents are obtained and that the newly recorded document is properly indexed. I suggest a conversation with the County Clerk.
When I find an error on the masslandrecords.com index or an image that is incorrectly tied to an index entry, I send an email to them describing the problem. They usually fix it within a half hour and send me a "thank you" email with whatever image I needed.
We of course let the county know when we find errors in the system. But, those errors seem to be legion, and not entering deeds into the index is a new thing and I don't have any idea how that can be fixed. To randomly come across two that weren't entered found during one job is disturbing. If I hadn't found the reference when looking at a deed in the same section, I never would have known they existed. I've found other issues in other counties, but never something this extreme.
It sounds like that recorder's office has either a process or a personnel issue - or both.
Maybe it's me, I think when I press the button stuff disappears. Had a similar thing happen in a different state. You put in a sec, township and range and the computer spits out the history of recent filings. This county goes back to 2002, prior to that you have to travel to the vault for deeds and COS's. However, some older info will show such as corner records.
I did a section and got all the deeds I needed but there weren't any corner records. Another day I revisit the same section and corner records show up. Maybe I missed them the first time, but I doubt it, so a third time I enter that section and check and no corner records. You have a couple of hundred options to pick from in a pull-down menu for document type and if you only select corner records they always show, but if you don't pick anything, sometimes they show, sometimes they don't. Which was a good lesson for me to learn, be specific and records sometimes will show up when they don't in a global selection.
So, now I always check for warranty deeds only, next selection quit claim deeds, then try special warranty deeds, ect.
Working through the area that way sometimes helps.