Request By:
Mr. Billy H. Squires
Green County Court Clerk
Greensburg, Kentucky 42743
Opinion
Opinion By: Robert F. Stephens, Attorney General; By: Charles W. Runyan, Assistant Deputy Attorney General
You have a problem in connection with furnishing recording data. You give the actual example of a general warranty deed conveying title to real estate to a man and wife. Then the grantees execute a mortgage of the property. The deed and mortgage were lodged with your office on the same day. The attorney for one of the parties in these transactions apparently wanted you, at the time he lodged the mortgage for recording, to give him the recording data as to the deed book and page number, wherein the title source deed is to be recorded, and which deed is the immediate source of title mentioned in the mortgage. Your question is to what extent the attorney may demand of you, before he leaves the mortagage with you for recording, a specific page number for the title source deed.
We do not believe that you are required to indicate a specific page number for the deed until your recording has been completed. See KRS 382.110 and 382.130. We find nothing in the statutes requiring the county clerk to give this "advance" information as to what the specific page number of a deed will be. It is our opinion that the clerk must be permitted to complete his timely recording of such instruments, once they are lodged for record. See KRS 382.200, providing that the names of parties to deeds and mortgages shall be put in an alphabetical crossindex, and within six days thereafter the instruments must be recorded.
In the actual example you submitted, in showing the immediate source of title on the mortgage, and since the mortgage was lodged for recording on the same day the title source deed was lodged, only the deed book number was known and inserted before the attorney left the mortgage for recording. We see no reason why the clerk cannot fill in the proper page number blank as to the title source deed on the mortgage prior to the complete recording of the mortgage. That would not be an alteration of the instrument. It would be a mere clerical act of filling in the proper page number as a matter of completing completing recording data. Of course the record cannot be altered as to show any substantive matter not in the original instrument. 76 C.J.S., Records, § 25, p. 127. But the clerk's filling in recording data is not an alteration.