body: In thinking about [notaries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notary_public#Common_law_jurisdictions), I'm wondering what happens when they pass on. My understanding basically is that a notary is an unbiased 3rd party that observes a transaction and creates some legal documentation about it or a legal document of some sort, and then "stores that at their office". It sounds like they are independent contractors or lawyer-like people who work for themselves. It looks like you need to be [certified](https://www.nationalnotary.org/knowledge-center/about-notaries/how-to-become-a-notary-public) as well.
  
  
  Given that, I'm wondering what happens if the notary passes on. I wonder who is in charge of their documents, the ones where they were the third party. Say Google and Space X had a notary called Foo Bar, and then Foo Bar passes on. I wonder if there is some state-structured system for passing their notarized docs to some other notary to take over, so Google and Space X would have some sort of *guarantee* that they would always have some notary to vouch for their contract for as long as the companies were in existence. Wondering what the protocol is here. It's not as if the notary's documents get dispersed to their children, or passed on to people according to an arbitrary will. I would imagine they'd need to be part of a highly structured system so that there is a chain of notaries that is unbroken and that is known to always be legally valid or something like that.
  
  
  
title: How notary documents are kept when the notary passes on