SALEM — John O’Brien has too much space.
The Southern Essex Register of Deeds, who has held the position since 1977 after three terms on the Lynn City Council as the youngest council member in city history, currently works out of a 39,000-square-foot facility in Shetland Park on Congress Street.
That space is primarily taken up by county property records, which date back centuries — but, O’Brien said, his department only needs 8,000 square feet.
Now, with just two years left in what he says will be his final term as the register, O’Brien, who has been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia and Parkinson’s disease, said in a Thursday afternoon interview that his primary goal for the remainder of his term is to get his office moved to a different location.
“I don’t know if you’ve been out there but you can shoot a cannon out there and we wouldn’t hit anything,” O’Brien quipped, reclining in a brown leather chair in his office. Part of the reason O’Brien feels the need to downsize is the complete digitization of the office’s records, dating back to 1639 — the oldest land records in the nation. “There isn’t a registry this size in Massachusetts or anywhere that can operate at 8,000 — we can,” he said. “And the reason we can is because all of our records, everything is online.”
The digitization process was a massive project, he said, and the registry first began scanning deeds in the 1980s.
“Once that started — and we were the first in the nation to provide it free of charge — we just kept building on that program,” he said. “We decided that okay, ‘let’s scan all the books’ … we just kept growing and growing and growing every day.”
After six years on the city council, O’Brien decided to run for the position of register after a friend told him “you either go up or out.”
“After that happened … I worked and worked and worked and I won, and honestly I [told] people even during that campaign I didn’t know much about the place,” he said. O’Brien’s victory over an incumbent Republican was part of a Democratic sweep that saw Jimmy Carter take the presidency.
When O’Brien was sworn into office at 25 years old, his top priority was to figure out how to make the registry better. Over the years, he said, he’s seen others take the job and do little to advance the office forward — treating it more like running the library and not wanting to “rock the boat.” The chief example of this phenomenon, he said, was when, during the 2008 financial crisis, most registers nationwide refused to go after big banks filing fraudulent documents.
O’Brien said the phenomenon was first brought to his attention when a woman came into the registry and explained that her bank had sold her mortgage. Typically when banks do so, they file documents with the registry, O’Brien said, but in this case, no such documents were filed.
“It turned into this whole nightmare with robo-signers and fraudulent documents. And we launched this and we went after some of the biggest banks in the country,” he said. “I thought that my colleagues around the country would jump on this in five seconds because the backbone of this country is the land recordation system.”
But, he said, only one other register joined the fight — Jeff Thigpen, the register for Guilford County, North Carolina.
“The two of us did everything we could to expose this … they thought I was crazy and a pain in the neck … well, the kids that were working here, they went through the records and they became forensic auditors overnight and we found 39,000 phony-baloney documents,” he said. “We’re always doing this because it’s important. You buy a house, you want to make sure that those records that pertain to your house are honest, and it’s my job and the staff here to make sure. We just keep going — being register of deeds is not like being a senator, but it’s very important. It really is.”
That belief is what kept O’Brien coming back — by the time he leaves the office in 2024, O’Brien will have served as the register for 47 years and eight terms. Aside from a “brief moment of insanity,” where he ran for mayor of Lynn in 1991 — ultimately losing to Pat McManus — O’Brien never considered doing anything else.
“I could never be a state rep or run for Congress or anything like that because I got a big mouth and I just couldn’t go up and follow everything that the speaker or the whatever might want me to do. I speak my mind and everything else,” O’Brien said with a laugh. Losing the race for mayor was “the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said.
“I enjoyed the registry. I liked what I was doing and it was a nice little niche,” he continued.
There is no cure for Lewy body dementia, O’Brien said, and though the diagnosis made it clear that he should step aside in two years, he said this was likely going to be his last term no matter what.
The lifelong Lynn resident, now 72, just moved to Danvers to be closer to his daughter, who built a house there. While it’s strange to confront moving from the city he’s known all his life, O’Brien said being around family is the best thing for him in retirement.
“I have mixed feelings about leaving Lynn, I’ll always be a Lynner. But it’s the best thing for us. I have to look down the road. You know, there’s no cure for what I have. So it’s good. My wife will be near my daughter and so will I and they’ll be able to look out for me, the crazy guy,” he said. “But I hated having to leave Lynn.”
Charlie McKenna can be reached at [email protected].