What happens when land records disappear

A recent example

In July 2026, an attacker broke into the computer systems of ANCPI, the Romanian agency that keeps the country's land registry, and deleted the registry database.

The attacker used stolen login credentials and first tried to extort the agency. When that failed, the attacker deleted the database and claimed to have destroyed the backups as well. Romanian officials said offline backups were kept in several locations, and the agency used them to rebuild.

For about a week, property transactions in Romania largely stopped. Notaries could not register sales, mortgages could not close, and owners could not get official confirmation of what they owned.

The event was reported as a cybersecurity story. It is also a clear example of how much land ownership depends on records.

Records are the evidence of ownership

Nothing about a tract of land shows who owns it. Ownership is shown by documents: deeds, probate records, court orders, and the public records that collect them. Title examination is the work of reading that evidence and deciding what it shows.

In Romania, people did not lose their homes or land when the database went down. What stopped was anything that required proving ownership to someone else: selling, borrowing against the land, or transferring it after a death. The land was still owned. It could not be dealt with until the records came back.

Topic 01 covers what title is and how it is shown.

How county records spread the risk

Romania keeps its land registry in a single national system. In the United States, land records are kept county by county, in more than 3,000 separate recording offices. Each office keeps its own books and indexes, and many still hold paper and microfilm going back to their first recorded documents.

This arrangement makes searching slower and less consistent than a single national database would be. It also means no single failure can take out the whole country's records. A problem in one county affects that county.

Courthouse fires

American land records have been lost before, mostly to fire. In the 1800s many county courthouses burned, some more than once, and the records inside burned with them. Texas and several other states have counties whose early records survive only in part. Researchers call them "burned counties."

The best-known example is the Chicago fire of October 1871, which destroyed Cook County's recorded land records. Three private abstract companies, Chase Brothers & Company, Shortall & Hoard, and Jones & Sellers, had kept their own indexes and notes of recorded documents, and they saved them from the fire. In 1872 Illinois passed the Burnt Records Act, which allowed those private records to be used as evidence in court. Cook County titles were rebuilt largely from them.

In Chicago in 1871 and in Romania in 2026, the records were recovered the same way: from a separate copy that the fire or the attacker could not reach.

What it means for title work

Most title work never involves a disaster. These examples still illustrate a few everyday points:

• A chain of title is only as good as the records behind it. Every link rests on a document someone can still find.
• Copies matter. County microfilm, abstracts, and old title files can fill gaps where originals are missing.
• Gaps are normal in older chains. Where records were lost, examiners work from what survives, such as abstracts, affidavits, and later recorded instruments, and note what could not be confirmed.

Sources