NEWS FEATURE: Virgin Mary _ New Jersey real estate mogul?

c. 2000 Religion News Service NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. _ By all accounts, she died almost 2,000 years ago and never set foot in the Western Hemisphere. But somehow the Virgin Mary suddenly appeared in Middlesex County’s computerized land records as a real estate mogul. The files report the Virgin Mary sold 248 properties between 1946 […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. _ By all accounts, she died almost 2,000 years ago and never set foot in the Western Hemisphere. But somehow the Virgin Mary suddenly appeared in Middlesex County’s computerized land records as a real estate mogul.

The files report the Virgin Mary sold 248 properties between 1946 and 1972, including deals with B&E Liquors Inc., the Hungarian Boy Scout Association, Union Carbide Corp. and Clover Leaf cemetery.


The records also say she took out eight mortgages, yet apparently had some cash flow problems that resulted in 109 tax liens against her.

This does not appear to be a Y2K problem, officials said, but simply a glitch that occurred last week after they expanded the computerization of their property records to include documents from several decades ago.

The county’s computer experts scrambled Thursday (Jan. 6) to figure out how the glitch occurred and how to fix it. It’s the latest mishap for a new system that cost $3 million, including $500,000 in unexpected expenses.

Unable to resolve the Virgin Mary glitch by the end of the day, county officials took the affected property records off-line. Those records will be available only in paper copies until the problem is solved, officials said.

Title searchers, who already have sued the county over problems with the property record computers, said the Virgin Mary’s appearance is just another example of flaws in the new system.”We think it’s a sign,”laughed Ann Sardone, a member of the Middlesex County Title Searchers’ Guild.

Joking aside, Sardone and her colleagues said the glitch could have serious consequences because it muddied the county’s computerized land records for several days.

Researching land transactions on the county’s new computers is a two-step process. First, a researcher inputs someone’s name to produce an index of all the transactions. Next, the researcher uses the index to call up a computerized image of the selected deed or mortgage.


In the glitch, the name “Virgin Mary” appeared in the index, replacing the identities of the actual parties involved in the transactions. The computerized images of the documents had the correct names.

But a researcher would have had a hard time finding the computerized images of those transactions affected by the Virgin Mary glitch because the correct names did not appear in the index.

In addition to the Virgin Mary problem, title searchers have found another glitch involving 1,650 transactions wrongly indexed under the name “Saints.”

County Clerk Elaine Flynn, who oversees the land records, downplayed the glitches.”This is one of those silly things that happen,”Flynn said.”It will all be corrected. There’s nothing corrupted.”

DEA END MALINCONICO

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