The County Recorder in Clay County is the custodian of all legal records pertaining to real estate, birth, death, marriage, marriage credentials, State/Federal tax liens and notary public registration.

When acting as the Registrar of Titles, the Clay County Recorder reviews each document before recording to determine if the document will cloud the title, similar to when an attorney examines an abstract for abstract property.  When property is held in a trust, an estate, or is part of a court proceeding, the Examiner of Titles issues a Directive to the Registrar of Titles regarding how to proceed.

The land records document process had its beginning centuries ago with a straight forward purpose and with tools such as very large leather bound books in which they hand wrote with ink and quill.  It has evolved into today’s process, where the purpose remains as noble and as focused as before, but now must make sure all citizens (local and nonlocal) have justifiable and easy access.  The tools now include state-of-the-art computers and software solutions, networks, firewalls, and other technologies beyond what most of us realize or deal with on a regular basis.  Throughout this journey the Recorders have met the challenges of ever-changing necessary statutes, new and modified acceptable document requirements, and certainly increased real estate transaction complexity.  When one also realizes that our country’s Recorders must manage an information repository where nothing is ever purged, altered, or eliminated, one truly begins to understand their progress and accomplishments over the past couple of centuries.

These changes have created challenges to uphold goals: 

1. Information integrity & timeliness

2. Security

3. Accessibility

The Clay County Recorder’s Office has accomplished many improvements over the years:

• Searchable document indexes on relevant key fields such as:
   

  • Last name

  • First name

  • Business name

  • Document recording information including document number, date and time

  • Document type including search groups of similar types

  • Related documents

  • Subdivision names/lots/blocks; section/township/range and quarter sections

  • Tax parcel identification numbers and more.
     

• Creating those indexes requires talented and trained staff members to interpret and glean the needed information from the recorded document and at times cautiously make determinations if unique spellings represent misspellings or valid spellings for the referenced party.  Often this unique and valuable perspective is possible because the Recorder’s office staff has a significant level of familiarity and connection with the community.
   

• In the past twenty years, Recorders have significantly improved document turnaround time to the point where it is now measured in hours, which helps to expedite and facilitate real estate transactions. 
   

• Electronic recording of documents has further improved turnaround time.  More importantly it has streamlined the process of getting documents to the courthouse and allowing them to be processed more efficiently.  Clay County started to e-record in 2006 and was the first in Minnesota to e-record mortgages and deeds.