When Callaway County Recorder of Deeds Christine Kleindienst first took office, she started looking into digitizing the county’s historical records.
The county started keeping digital records of deeds, plats and marriage licenses on computers in 1996, but her office stores records that go back to the county’s founding.
“Before I took office, I was in title insurance and I worked at a title company,” Kleindienst said. “I just know the importance of the documents so it was just really important to me.”
The office hired an outside company for $66,000 to come in and help digitize the more than 200 books of records stored in the courthouse.
The books don’t fit on a normal scanner so company staff took pictures of individual pages and kept an index of the records.
Now, along with the books, the records are stored on a flash drive in the courthouse, but Kleindienst said that isn’t the only copy.
The courthouse IT department also has a flash drive and she has a third copy stored off site.
Kleindienst said she wanted to ensure if something happened to the courthouse — like a fire or tornado — the records wouldn’t be lost entirely.
While the older records — such as deeds and marriage licenses — that date back to the county’s founding aren’t searched for very often, Kleindienst said it does happen.
For instance, she said, people who research their own genealogy might call looking for a marriage license or somebody wants to check if they qualify as a century farm might come looking for a deed.
Kleindienst said the staff normally had to call somebody back if they were looking for an older record, but with the digitized system, they can find it more quickly.
“Now we can actually stay on the phone,” and ask questions, she said. “Could they have used a different name? What if it was misspelled? Because sometimes it’s hard to read their writing.”
Her office also remains home to some original marriage licenses and deeds that date back to the early 1800s.
Kleindienst said it wasn’t uncommon for people to not take the original copy back because they had to travel to the courthouse by horse from all over the county. Some just couldn’t afford to make the trip back to pick the document back up.
Now, those are also digitized.
If a natural disaster did impact the courthouse, while the physical copies could be lost, the documents would still be available.
“If the computer goes down or something happened to the courthouse, once we get up and working, I’ve got it stored with my software company in Independence, Missouri,” Kleindienst said. “They can get all my images to me.”
Part of the collection of historical documents in County Recorder of Deeds Christine Kleindienst's office is a box of original marriage licenses dating back to the county's founding. Michael Shine/Fulton Sun photo
This is one of the original marriage licenses dating back to the 1800s that the County Recorder of Deeds Christine Kleindienst's office stores. The marriage licenses are handwritten and would have been brought to the courthouse by horse, she said. For some people, it was too expensive to come back and get the original back after the county copied it. Michael Shine/Fulton Sun photo