Happy New Year to everyone!!!
Below I have re-typed a newspaper article which appeared on Page 1 of the Cincinnati (OH) Enquirer newspaper on Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2009. I have not looked at the website, so not sure how helpful it will be, but the article makes it sound like a boon to genealogists. Here's hoping ............
Files Date As Far Back As 1791
Old County Documents Go Online
by Kimball Perry
kperry@enquirer.com
What do former U.S. President William Henry Harrison and Nicholas Longworth have in common besides being early local settlers and politicians?
They were involved in an estate settlement here in 1815.
The proof of that is one of more than 1 million Hamilton County documents -- some dating to 1791 -- now available online from the Probate Court that will be a boon to genealogy buffs, history researchers and anyone trying to see what happened to great-grandpa's belongings when he died.
"These are probably some of the oldest records in the state," Probate Court Judge James Cissell said. "These records are part of history."
The newly available documents include birth, death, marriage, estate, naturalization and other records.
"There are many, many folks who wish to trace their genealogy. By doing this, people will not have to come to our office in Cincinnati," Cissell said.
The project started after Cissell took office in 2003 and decided to preserve 1,600 books, each weighing 30 pounds, and their 1.1 million documents by digitizing them and putting them online. Before, only documents after 1983 were available online.
The documents are as mundane as guardianship records from the late 18th century to tidbits that mark personal moments of Hollywood stars.
One of the interesting documents rediscovered during the digitization was the marriage license -- much of it handwritten -- of Spencer Tracy.
The noted actor was 23 when he married Sept. 12, 1923, in Cincinnati. The Milwaukee resident listed his occupation and his parents' name, and that this was his first marriage. In a Catholic ceremony, Tracy married Louise Treadwell, 24, an actress from New Castle, Pa., who listed her home as the Sinton Hotel in downtown Cincinnati.
The Probate Court is teaming with the University of Cincinnati, which stored some of the old Probate Court records after courthouse fires, to complete the project.
All of the work to place the 1.1 million documents online was done by Probate Court workers except for the $95,000 cost of a private contractor to digitize each page.
Once the old documents are digitized, they also will have to be stored on microfilm because, Cissell said, that is the official way such records are to be kept.
"It's going both directions. By the time we're done with this, we may be the only court in the country that has all of the records in both formats, which, I think, is a hell of an accomplishment," Cissell said.
That will take some time because there are more than 10 million pages that need to be made available in both formats.
The new digitized documents also serve a more practical purpose.
Many documents are stored in ways that physically won't last.
"If we don't do it shortly, we may lose it because all that microfilm is wasting away," Cissell said. "We have 4,000 rolls of microfilm of records which are quickly disintegrating.
"Once that's done, everything we have here will be available on the Internet."
The exception are documents destroyed in three courthouse fires over the generations.
Cissell is keeping the 1,600 books that contain the original documents. Each is bound by a rubber band in a Probate Court office.
Using technology to preserve -- and make available -- public records isn't new to Cissell.
He was the clerk of courts in the 1990's when the office created a website -- www.courtclerk.org -- that won national awards because it made available online millions of pages of criminal and civil court cases. That website has evolved so that, while allowing access at any time to court documents, it also allows attorneys to electronically file suits and other documents at any time.
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Accompanying Sidebar Article:
File Search
To see 1.1 million Hamilton County court documents such as birth, death, marriage, estate, naturalization and other records -- some dating back to 1791 -- go online to www.probatect.org. Click on Records Search then Archive Search.
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P.S. from the sender: I also heard recently that The Blegen Library at University of Cincinnati plans to digitize the index cards containing Cincinnati birth records (1874-1901) and death records (1865-1909) sometime this year -- 2010. Let's keep our fingers crossed on that one, too!!!!
Kathy (Gilbert) Payne
Researching Surnames:
UCHTMAN, ARLINGHAUS, KOHRMANN, BUERLEIN-Germany
MEES, SCHULTZ, JACOB- Alsace-Lorraine
BEHYMER, SWISHER - Ohio