I've been trying unsuccessfully for several years to get the OLTA and the counties I do searches in to put a "date of change" in the computerized records whenever an index record is changed.  Old habits don't seem to change at the county level, and the several people I wrote at the OLTA never took up the issue.

If you want to see the way a county Recorder indicates a change so all can see the change and date of that change, then log onto landaccess.com.  Enter the database for Ross Co., Ohio.  (This is a free search.)  Then go to book and page for volume 520, page 774.  You'll see that back in 1990, there was a misspelling for Gertrude Monk (i.e., "Gertude").  The misspelling was changed on 1/2/01.  The original error was left on the record and the new change was made within the correctly spelled matrix.  This method is what I wish all Recorders and Clerks would copy.  The Gertrude Monk example is just one example for the way Ross Co. handles their misindexings.

Not long ago, I had an E&O incident in part because of an incorrectly spelled name in the records of another county.  (The wife's name was incorrectly spelled "Watson" and the husband's name was correctly spelled "Matson.")   I also thought that there should be some indication within the internal records of the database that an IT person would know the date and time the record was changed, if at all.  The IT person I spoke with from Land Access said that only the county Recorder can authorize this IT search and someone (meaning the county commissioners or the abstractor) would have to pay for this difficult search at the database level.  I doubt if this search would be cheap. I welcome help from anyone, anywhere to get other counties to make their indexing errors more transparent.

This may sound harsh, but I keep any errors I find to myself because if the counties don't make their errors public, the changes I find and the county fixes without a date of change may harm another examiner more in the long run.  The best practice is to print out a copy of the error and place it with the search file.  I also mention the error to other searchers who frequent that county to be on the lookout for this type of error for that particular county.  I hope this information is helpful to others.