Ms Lorna Fleming:

I love big, dusty books. For that sort of manual searching, certainly up to 1970, people manually had to search all of the books. The challenge is that changes in ownership are registered by the lessor - the person who is transferring the property - and if you do not know what that person's name is, it is quite challenging to find the memorials or records that are there. The person selling the property may not necessarily be the property owner and it could be their son or daughter or the executor of the estate, which may not be a family member, so some of those searches can be quite challenging. That is why, if you are searching for something and you just cannot find it, you have to look at the big picture and look at the probate records to try to determine who it might be, what the different names might be and the variations.