Warning: took me 4 hours to dig through old city records for a property line dispute

I was trying to settle a fence disagreement with my neighbor in Portland (the usual backyard drama) and thought city hall would have things online. Nope, spent an entire Saturday hunting down microfilm records from 1987 because apparently nobody scanned them. The clerk even told me "good luck" when I walked in, which should have been my first clue. Has anyone else dealt with those ancient city record archives that just refuse to be digitized?

3 comments

3 Comments

shane_morgan3d ago

It's funny how we think the modern world has everything figured out, but the second you dig into old records, you realize half our systems are still held together by paper and memory from decades ago. Makes you wonder what else is quietly running on ancient info that nobody bothered to update.

kimr914d ago

Ugh, honestly I think you guys are MAKING this way harder than it needs to be. Just hire a licensed surveyor for $400 and be done with it instead of playing detective with microfilm all weekend. I did that for my property line issue and they had everything figured out in two hours, no crying over lost creeks or dead clerks. Sometimes paying a pro is cheaper than wasting your Saturday on a nostalgia trip through city hall.

andrew_baker94d ago

Wound up in a similar mess trying to figure out why my garage was three feet over the property line. Turned out the original survey from 1962 used a creek that dried up decades ago as the boundary marker. Half the day was just trying to find someone who remembered where the creek even was.