The recorder’s office at the Daviess County Courthouse is nearing the end of a process to convert the remainder of its documents to digital.
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Georgia Maxwell, recorder of deeds, said it is the largest back-scanning project in the county’s history. About 900,000 more pages of documents from the storage vault have now been digitally archived. The project was financed entirely by state mandated fees earmarked for preservation of records.
Records since 2007 have already been digitized. This project was to digitize the older documents.
Mid-Continent Micrographics, a company located in nearby St. Joseph, was hired to do the work. Jerry Dean has been with the company for 17 years and Jerry Larson for 14 years. Both are from St. Joe. They have been at the courthouse for about a month scanning records that date back to 1837.
"We are digitizing all of our deed books as well as marriage records since we became a county," said Maxwell.
Dean and Larson photograph and save the documents to the computer — about 20,000 pages a day. The images are reduced on average 25 times the size of the original. They are then ready for transmission, storage, reading, and printing.
"If the ledgers are really old, we sometimes have to take the pages apart," said Dean. "We also have to take more time with hand-written pages."
All the documents at the recorder’s office have a book and a page number. After conversion, they can be called up on screen at the recorder’s office with the click of a button. It will save wear and tear on the old, fragile books.
"Computers are not archival safe, so we would never do away with the books," said Maxwell. "We will continue to maintain our original bound paper records. This is just another safeguard to back up our microfilm copies, which are stored in underground vaults. It will also make access to the records easier."
Dean and Larson have no doubts about the need to keep important records backed up. They’ve had personal experience with a few of those unpredictable "acts of God."
"We were working at the courthouse in Hardin County, Iowa, when a water pipe burst and dropped the ceiling all over the place," said Dean. "There was three inches of water on the floor."
They were working near Greensburg, Kan., in 2007 when a tornado went through. Fortunately the records at Greensburg were stored safely underground.
"If there is a fire or flood, there is no way to get the records back," Dean said.
Larson and Dean work mostly at courthouses, but also have made digital records for hospitals and schools. They have done over 500 courthouses in several states. Dean said he sometimes wonders what it was like to live back in 1837.
"I wonder what their day was like," he said. "They used quill pens. I can tell by the little black blobs of ink on the page. It was very neat, but it can be hard to read."
He said he enjoys seeing the courthouses in different seasons. "Each courthouse is a little different," he said. "A lot are on the historical registry."
Digital formatting doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel because most people already use computers. But Maxwell said it will make access easier.
"Genealogists from across the nation frequently visit Daviess County for copies of their ancestors’ documents," she said. "Currently, the office spends considerable time handling the original books, taking them apart, and making individual copies. After completion of this project, copies can be printed directly from the computer."