When people visiting the City Register’s office at 210 Joralemon St. in Brooklyn get stumped as they search for property records, they often turn to Sr. Title Examiner Irving Nadel.

A city employee since 1963, Mr. Nadel is a master of tracking down liens, deeds and other legal instruments.“If we weren’t here, people would just be told to go to the computer and look up the records themselves,” he said.

“Sometimes there are seven or eight people stuck at the counter. I like to help them out. A lot of people don’t want to go through the process of searching on the computer or looking through actual records.”

Though Mr. Nadel spends part of his day helping people, he actually devotes more time to feeding property records into a computer.

The office has recorded all property transactions since 1982 on the computer, and it is now working on a project to computerize the records back to 1966.
“It is easier now for the Title Examiner to make a search,” said Mr. Nadel, reflecting upon the use of technology.

“Years it go it was more interesting because you would go to the actual records,” he said. Nowadays, Mr. Nadel spends some time helping people find records on the computer. But he also regularly helps people search for actual documents from before 1982, because Title Examiners need to track the history of properties for at least 40 years.

Mr. Nadel’s years of experience help him sense when records aren’t right. He once discovered a transaction signed by a dead person.

“I reported it, and they had to get someone else to sign,” Mr. Nadel said.