OFFICE ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT 575 



Both the dedication and the surveyor's certificate are usually sub- 

 scribed and sworn to before a notary public. 



The complete file of these plats may be placed in a book for ready 

 reference. It is this book that is usually referred to when any question of 

 ownership or boundaries arises, and therefore it should be complete and 

 up-to-date at all times. Frequently it happens that various conditions have 

 been attached to deeds to some of the property or that for some reason or 

 other the abstract to the property may be called for at any time. For this 

 reason the plat should be so made that it indicates parcels of land con- 

 veyed by each deed, a copy of which will be in the office of the secretary. 

 These parcels have placed upon them some index number or other identi- 

 fication mark so that the deed can be readily obtained from the files. If 

 the deeds are numbered the deed number can be placed on the parcel of 

 land on the plat, or book and page number in which the deed is recorded 

 in the register of deeds office may be placed on the parcel of land represented 

 on the plat. Any designating mark that will readily locate or identify the 

 deed will be sufficient. 



There should, too, be a separate system of parceling carried out in a 

 similar manner to locate the abstracts to the property. Probably a third 

 system of parceling may be necessary in complicated cases in order to locate 

 the various proceedings of acquisition which have been completed in the 

 acquisition of the park itself. More often, however, the important deeds 

 of the acquisition can be recorded by a stamp or by footnotes. These 

 suggestions take it for granted that there will be kept a complete and sys- 

 tematic file of all deeds and miscellaneous papers having to do with the 

 title of property, and that a separate file will be kept for the abstracts. It 

 is possible, of course, to combine the abstracts and the deeds into one file, 

 but too often the abstracts cover a great deal more property than do the 

 individual deeds, and consequently the combining of the two into one file 

 often becomes very complicated. 



It is also taken for granted that a complete file of each proceeding for 

 the acquisition of park property is maintained. These files are matters of 

 individual design for the case of each particular park system. Experience 

 will tell exactly which additional files and indexes will be necessary to keep 

 in this connection, but whatever the system is the answers to the following 

 questions should be always readily available from the records kept: 



How much park property is owned? 



What are the exact boundaries of each park in the system? 



Under what legal proceedings was each park acquired? 



On what pieces of park property are there conditions of conveyance 

 attached which conditions have not been fulfilled? 



