History in the parcel fabric is tracked by capturing the legal parcel records that create and retire parcels.
Parcel features are associated with the record that created them and the record that retired them. When parcels are created in a new record, the GlobalID of the associated parcel record is stored in the Created By Record attribute field of the parcel features. When a new record retires parcels (makes them historic), the Retired By Record attribute field of historic parcel features stores the GlobalID of the parcel record.
Use the Set Current 
and Set Historic 
commands in the Tools gallery on the Parcel Record Workflows tab to manually set parcels or parcel lines as current or historic.
Parcel editing tools such as Copy Lines To and Merge automatically save the original parcels as historic when the new parcels are created.
Set historic
To set current parcels as historic, set the record that will retire the parcels as active in the map. Select the parcels or lines you want to set as historic and click
Set Historic in the Tools gallery on the Parcel Record Workflows tab.
Tip:
Select the parcel polygon to select the parcel and its associated features.Tip:
To display historic parcels, turn on the Historic group layer for the parcel type in the Contents pane. Historic parcel sublayers have a retiredbyrecord IS NOT NULL definition query.When parcels become historic, record data is updated as follows:
- The Retired By Record attribute field of the parcel features is populated with the GlobalID of the active record (the record that retired them).
- The Retired Parcel Count field of the active record is updated with the number of parcels made historic by the record.
- The record polygon shape is updated to include the shapes of the historic parcels. In cases such as a merge, historic parcels will not change the shape of the record polygon.
Parcel features
When manually setting a parcel as historic, parcel features are updated as follows:
- If the parcel being set as historic shares lines with adjacent parcels, the shared lines remain current for the adjacent parcel.
- If the parcel being set as historic shares part of a bounding line with an adjacent parcel that is current, the bounding line is split such that the current parcel has coincident current lines. The original bounding line is saved as historic.
- If the parcel being set as historic has overlapping boundaries with adjacent parcels of the same type, the line that is associated with the same record as the parcel is set as historic.
- If the parcel points are not shared with any other parcel, the points are set as historic.
Set current
To set historic parcels as current, select the parcels and click Set Current in the Tools gallery on the Parcel Record Workflows tab.
When historic parcels or lines are set as current, record data is updated as follows:
- The Retired By Record attribute field of the parcel features is set to NULL.
- The record polygon shape is updated to include the shapes of the parcels that were made current.