November 13, 2007:  Interested in researching the history of your property?  Misplaced a copy of a recent legal filing? Looking for the covenants and restrictions against your property?  In response to requests from residents and as part of a major effort to make the Office of the Westchester County Clerk more accessible, millions of documents on file in the Clerk’s Office can now be viewed online for a daily user fee of $20.00.  Access from a home or business computer had previously been available only to annual subscribers who paid a $1,200.00 subscription fee. 

“Residents throughout the county shared with me a desire to be able to view our records online as it is not always possible for them to get to our White Plains office during regular business hours,” began Idoni.  “And for those who only need to access our records every once in a while, our subscription service did not make financial sense,” he continued.  While these records can be viewed without cost in the Office of the Westchester County Clerk, Idoni indicated that charging a user fee for online access allowed the cost of developing this option to be borne by the users of the system rather than the general taxpayer.

The records which can be viewed online for a daily fee of $20.00, payable online by MasterCard or Visa, include land records such as deeds going back to 1680 and mortgages recorded as far back as 1957; and unrestricted court records including summons, complaints, decisions and orders from cases commenced after January 1, 2002.

Visitors to the Office of the Westchester County Clerk website can still use the free online public viewer to search our indexes to be sure that a document is on file in our office before paying the daily user fee to gain access to an online image.  In addition, customers are encouraged to review the List of Available Documents to be sure the imaged document is not sealed or restricted, such as in the case of a matrimonial file.  “Whether you are an attorney who wishes to review a case file from the convenience of your office or a homeowner wanting to research the history of your property from the comfort of your home, we hope you will give our new service a try,” concluded Idoni.

The Office of the Westchester County Clerk is located at 110 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in White Plains and is open from 8:00 a.m. to 5:45 p.m., Monday through Friday, excluding legal holidays.  For more information, please contact us at cclerk@westchestergov.com or (914)995-3080.