§ 8.01-393.When book or paper or equivalent in clerk's office lost, destroyed, or illegible to be again recorded.

Deed books, will books, and the miscellaneous papers filed in a Virginia clerk’s office anchor a lot of legal certainty about who owns what. Section 8.01-393 addresses what happens when that anchor is damaged — when a book of recorded wills, deeds, or other papers, or any other paper filed in the clerk’s office, is lost, destroyed, or illegible.

The fix depends on someone bringing the clerk the raw material to rebuild it. If a person produces the original paper that was recorded in the damaged book, or an attested copy of the record, or anything else that was in that book or filed there, the clerk records it anew upon application. The clerk is not just copying blindly, either — the new record has to show whether it was made from an original document or from a copy, and how that source paper was authenticated or attested in the first place, so the provenance of the rebuilt record stays clear.

Once made, the new record stands in for what it replaces. As far as the law can make it so, the reconstructed record carries the same effect that the original record or paper would have had, which keeps deeds, wills, and other recorded instruments enforceable even after the physical book that once held them is gone.