By MARJORIE NEEDHAM
Middlebury land records are available online, so title searches and other land record research can begin right at your own computer. How far one goes with the online program, uslandrecords.com, may depend on weighing time versus money.
That’s because each page of information viewed or printed through the new program costs $2, and those using the program can’t choose to view or print just one page. If the document they need is 20 pages long, they will have to pay for all 20 pages, even if only three pages are of interest to them. Despite this, the system likely will be helpful to many who need to access Middlebury land records. Users can, for example, find out if the property next door sold just by going into the indexes and not viewing or printing any of the documents.
Middlebury Town Clerk Edith Salisbury said she began looking into this type of software several years ago. “I didn’t want services to cost money, and I didn’t want the town to lose revenue,” she said. By state statute, the town charges $1 a page for copies of land records. Last year, those charges brought in more than $9,000. An online program that allowed users to view and print land records at no cost was not an option, Salisbury said, because the town couldn’t afford to lose that much revenue.
Since the town contracts with ACS/Xerox to microfilm and verify land record indexes (as state law requires), Salisbury said it made sense to have them provide the service. “They have the indexes from 1807 to the present,” Salisbury said.
We asked how current the records are, and Salisbury went online to check. On April 30, documents recorded in the town clerk’s office April 28 were already online.
Salisbury noted there has been some confusion about indexes and images. The indexes list all land transactions back to 1807. They contain a lot of information about the transactions, but don’t necessarily offer images of the documents themselves. Currently, images are available for land records dating back to 1999.
Older images will become available as scanning of them is funded through state library grants. This is an ongoing project begun three years ago. In three years, 10 years of images have been added to the records.
Salisbury said title searchers find the online records helpful because they can look at the indexes and gauge the amount of time they will have to spend at town hall based on the number of records associated with the property they are researching. Even if the images are available online, they probably still will come to town hall, she said, because they will save a dollar a page if they do so.
Salisbury said people often need only the first two pages of a mortgage and the signature page, so at town hall they would pay $3 for those pages. If they view or print the same document through the online site, they will have to pay $2 a page for every page in the document, whether they need it or not. For a 20-page document, they would pay $40.
Genealogists also may find the online site helpful for their research. And while it would seem likely someone out in California doing genealogical research might choose to pay $2 a page to print a document, if they aren’t in a hurry they can send a check to Salisbury to cover the pages they need, and she will mail the pages to them. She said she handles a lot of requests for copies by telephone and by mail.
The online site is uslandrecords.com. Once there, click on Connecticut on the map of the U.S. That takes you to the next screen, where you can choose Middlebury in the box that says “Select a city/town.” That takes you to a page where you can enter your search criteria, searching by name, document or volume and choosing the date range and types of documents you would like to search for. When the results come up you will have basic information for that record – filing date, the person’s status (grantee or grantor), the record number, the type of record, the number of pages and the volume and page in the town hall land record books. Clicking on the preview button will give more information on the property.
To go farther, even just to look at the documents, you will have to pay $2 a page. However, as mentioned earlier, you can go to town hall and pay $1 a page for copies, or you can mail your check to Salisbury, and she will make copies and mail them back to you.
