Land Records

The Howard County Circuit Court in Ellicott City has alleviated some of its severe crowding by adding 5,200 square feet - in Columbia. Starting today, nonjudicial functions of the court, including land records, marriage licenses and business licenses, will be housed at the county-owned Thomas Dorsey Building, off Bendix Road. The new office will include cashiers to handle licenses and title filings, scanning and indexing departments to manage records and a public area with computer terminals for document searches.

Appearing before nearly 200 supporters last night, Republican Margaret Duly Rappaport announced her bid for another four-year term as the clerk of the Howard County Circuit Court.The Ellicott City resident said she hopes to continue streamlining the operations of an office that manages thousands of criminal cases, civil filings and land records.Surrounded by her family, employees and candidates for other offices, Mrs. Rappaport, 59, announced her candidacy at a fund-raiser at the Hilton Inn in Columbia.

Dear Mr. Gisriel:I'm a retired military man. I recently signed a contract and put a deposit on a house that my wife and I plan on living in during retirement. The settlement date is July 28; however, there is no way I'll be able to sell our current residence by that date. Will I have to pay capital-gains tax on the sale of my existing house if I can't sell it by the date of my new purchase?Russell R. VedeliaFrederickDear Mr. Vedelia: First of all, if you and your wife are both at least 55 years old, then you have a one-time capital-gains tax exclusion coming for the sale of your residence of up to $125,000 of your net gain from the sale of your existing residence.

Q: I bought a house over a year ago. The deed was recorded in the county land records but I never received the original back from my settlement. Is this a problem?Kim Villanova, RandallstownA: Although having the original deed in your possession might make you feel better, it really is of no legal significance.Maryland is a "race-notice" state. This means that a valid deed that is recorded in the land records in the county where the property is located takes legal priority over all other valid deeds to the same property, even though the first recorded deed might have been validly executed after the later recorded deed.

Howard County's title searchers want the county executive to find a closer, more convenient alternative to a plan to move local land records from the Circuit Courthouse to a Howard-owned building five miles away. In a letter sent to County Executive James N. Robey this week, the searchers insisted that the county does not need to split the documents they use daily - land records, court judgments and estates - between two distant buildings to fix the problems that have troubled Clerk of the Circuit Court Margaret D. Rappaport's cramped offices for years.

Howard Circuit Court Clerk Margaret D. Rappaport is planning to move land records out of her offices in the county's cramped courthouse and into a government-owned building five miles away -- a move that title searchers and others who ply their trade among the records say will create a "logistical nightmare" for them. But Rappaport told the title searchers, who forced their way into a meeting on the issue last night, that she had no choice, especially after she learned that renovations planned for the recently vacated state's attorney's office included little new space for her expanding needs.

Eleven years ago, under the weight of three centuries' worth )) of court, marriage, land and death records, the state opened a new $7.5 million building for the Maryland State Archives roomy enough to hold every document that would be churned out into the next century.But the three-story building is filled already.Last month, state officials quietly signed a lease to rent additional storage space near Baltimore-Washington International Airport."I think they wanted to build a place where they could put everything in one building and have room for the staff to work," said Patricia Melville, director of reference services at the archives.

A Severn business consultant and Democratic activist who says he wants to bring innovation to the Anne Arundel County Circuit Court is hoping to unseat the incumbent clerk of the court next week. "We need to do a better job down at the courthouse," said Michael J. Serabian Sr., the Democratic hopeful, who said he would like to bring a modern business approach to the office. Robert P. Duckworth, a Republican seeking his third term as clerk, said he has led the office though eight years of improvements and hopes to make more.

In the records piled high on Mary Gardner's dining-room table live farmers, mill hands, housewives and freed slaves.They are past residents of the Montgomery County town of Brookeville, the people whose stories are told in these census reports and land records.To Ms. Gardner these records also represent the makings of an (( enormous guest list. This year, with the help of volunteers, she has set about the ambitious task of identifying everyone who has lived, worked or owned property in Brookeville.

Sometimes the past gives up its secrets reluctantly -- that's what we discovered recently when we tried to track the history of the house we're working on to find out exactly how old it is.We've thought, based on architectural detail and neighborhood history, that the house must date to somewhere in the 1870s. And we still think that. But getting even that far was something of a battle.To help in our search, we enlisted Mike Gisriel, vice president of Fountainhead Title Group of Baltimore.