Losing Our History One Page at a Time

           One of the opportunities that I have had while working with archives is to do research at local small town courthouses here in West Texas.  Courthouse documents are treasure troves of information about the development of a town, the buying and selling of land, and other legal matters. Unfortunately the court records in the counties I visited are slowly deteriorating.  Some are stored in cellars, which could flood if it ever were to rain.  All are used on a daily basis some quite extensively because of the current oil boom.  As far as I know the counties do not have back ups although recently title companies are copying the land records.  Texas is late adopting title insurance.  Historically land records, known as abstracts, were and still are kept by the individual property owners rather than a title company.  Abstracts provide a copy of every legal transaction that has occurred to the property if it was recorded in the courthouse.

            Courthouse records need to be put on microfilm so that the information is preserved.  Microfilm is the one of the few backup material that will last when the paper is gone.  If that can’t happen due to financial constraints then the material should be scanned and stored in the cloud.   Someone will have to be assigned to insure that the material is upgraded when the technology changes, which you may have noticed is frequent.   The West Texas Digital Archives will be scanning records from Abilene City Hall (mostly City Council meetings).  Hopefully we will be able to expand this to courthouse records in surrounding towns. What a great project that would be!  You should look into the preservation steps that your local government agency is taking to preserve their records. If you are a genealogist or a historian these records are invaluable