What is the importance of our Registry of Deeds office in the Essex County Southern District? What is the Registry of Deeds? What does it do? These are questions I am asked often by many of the voters I’ve spoken with in the district. The Registry serves an important function in our society. Our state has 21 separate Registries of Deeds, each operating in districts and responsible for the recording of real estate registration and land records. This cannot be understated Ð our land records are public documents and preserving those documents helps preserve our history, our economy, and our rights as property and land owners. If you need to sell your home, or modify your mortgage, or protect your home against unfairly assessed taxes Ð it is incumbent upon the Register of Deeds to record and maintain accurate records for use by homeowners, title researchers, Boards of Assessors, Probate Court, Land Court, Real Estate professionals, Historic District Commissioners, and historians of our culture, society and political changes.
These registries are not centralized but rather divided by county or subdivided within official state counties. These divisions are headed by elected officials known as a Register,[1] and fall under the authority of the Secretary of State and local county governments. Our Registry of Deeds operates in the Southern district of Essex County, which includes 30 of the 34 towns and cities in Essex County, and operates under the Secretary of State. It has nearly a $3,000,000 budget and brings in approximately $36,000,000 in recording fees to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. This registry was established on May 10, 1643. Registration and land records go all the way back to even before that year.
When I started this campaign, my platform was simple. Provide great customer service, and good government, eliminate conflicts of interests in the management of the office, support term limits, and depoliticize the office as much possible. I still believe in those things and will fight for them. But I also strongly believe that we need to preserve and modernize this institution so that we can preserve our recorded documents and historical records, upgrade the Salem Registry’s ability to e-file documents, enhance the fraud alert system and focus on cyber security, and focus on the protection of physical documents so that they are available for review by the public. If elected to serve as a Register of Deeds I will keep focused on serving the pubic faithfully because this Registry of Deeds belongs to the people, not special interests or political insiders! Please vote for Jonathan Ring for Register of Deeds on Tuesday November 6, 2018. Thank you again for your consideration,