RALEIGH -- What lies ahead for Wake County may be cloudy, but the past is getting clearer all the time.
Both the county's Register of Deeds office and the Olivia Raney Local History Library are offering new means by which private citizens and professionals can research the county's past and families' personal histories. To make county documents dating back to 1785 easily available, the Register of Deeds office recently scanned and indexed more than 88,000 documents for perusal on the Web.
It's part of an effort here and elsewhere across the nation to make everything old new again via technology.
Register of Deeds Laura Riddick and her staff already had all Wake County deeds digitized by the end of 2009. Starting in January, they scanned and indexed 47,760 deeds totaling 88,075 pages to take the county's records back to a time before the signing of the U.S. Constitution. It was driven both by Riddick's background in public history and by continuing demand for the old records.
"You'd be amazed at the number of genealogists and attorneys who want to go back with their title search," she said. "You would see people lining up for the microfilm machines."
Now people can go to the register's website and sift through records on their own, although an initial orientation with a staff member on the information desk is recommended.
"The records tell great stories, but they leave a lot of questions, too," said Nicholas Graham, program coordinator for the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center at UNC-Chapel Hill.
A wider look
The returns on family searches at the Olivia Raney Local History Library aren't as immediate, but they involve an immense wealth of records that are presided over by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah. The program allows patrons of the Wake County library to request microfilm records -- four at a time for four weeks at a time -- to be sent to Raleigh and read on microfilm machines at the Olivia Raney library, off Poole Road near I-440.
Mormons have collected a large number of documents in an effort to unite their families for eternity by praying for them, according to church doctrine. Much of the information is only available on microfilm. That's where county librarian Karen-Marie Allen and her staff come into play. If a patron requests, say, cemetery records for a New England village in the 1880s, the library will order the documents, provide a machine to read them on and even help the patron copy the records digitally via a USB connection.
"The church really encourages people to research their families," Allen said. "You have new tools, but it really all comes back to family history."
One of Allen's regular customers is Historic Oakwood resident Bob Chapman, an announcer on classical music station WCPE-FM. Chapman is interested in both family and real estate records as he researches his 19th-century home on Polk Street.
"I'm interested in getting a plaque for the house, but in order to do that I have to verify all of the information," Chapman said.
He says officials of the neighborhood group are sticklers for architectural and historical details, and that's as it should be.
"Otherwise, you'd have every Tom, Dick, and Harry putting up a plaque," Chapman said.
Mapping history
Graham, with UNC's Digital Heritage Center, says different groups - North Carolina State Archives, the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill and the Outer Banks History Center - are meshing resources to preserve records of the state's long history.
"We are finishing up a big project to digitize historic maps," he said of the North Carolina Maps online effort. "These are mostly published maps going back to the late 1500s up to modern road maps.
"We can do some really cool things where we can overlap historic maps over a modern aerial image. That tells you a lot about how things have changed."
Riddick, wary of too much change in digital technology, still sends each day's closings and other transactions - more than a million pages a year - away for off-site conversion to microfilm. There have been notable instances of technology changing so rapidly that government agencies wind up with large stores of unusable documents because the devices used to read them have become obsolete.
"With microfilm, if nothing else, you can read it with a magnifying glass," Riddick said.
