"kissme126" writes:
Most of the time, a release or discharge is sent to the recorders office,
but in some states it is sent to a trustee or to the homeowner.

When I contacted the prior lender shortly after the refinancing to ask
where my discharge was, they claimed that they had mailed it to the
registry of deeds to be recorded but it was taking a long time because
the registry was extremely backed up (budget cuts, you see). I called
the registry and they confirmed that they were backed up but were
unable to confirm whether my discharge was sitting in their queue
waiting to be registered.

The other facts of which I am aware are that (a) I never received a
recorded discharge in the mail as the lender claimed I eventually
would and (b) the registry's on-line database does not show the
discharge.

Neither of these facts is absolute proof that no discharge was
recorded. As for (a), the registry could have screwed up and not
mailed the discharge back to the lender after recording it, or the
lender could have screwed up and lost the discharge after it was
mailed back to them. As for (b), the registry's on-line database is
really sucky so the data could have never been entered or could have
been entered in such garbled form that my searches for it wouldn't
work.

Therefore, if I end up dealing with this myself, I'll start by going to
the registry, pulling the book containing the original mortgage page
off the shelf and checking if a discharge is already been registered
for it. If so, I can go home a happy man without paying the $75 fee
:-).

If you received a discharge from the previous mortgage company that is not
recorded, they should have sent a check with it. Is it possible that there
is no recording fee where you live?

I'm not sure I understand your question. Didn't I just say in the
message to which you were replying that there's a $75 fee for
recording a discharge?