Thousands of historic Muskingum County documents now on Familysearch.org
ZANESVILLE — Hidden in the basement of the Richard D. Hixson Court & Government Services Building in downtown Zanesville, hundreds of thousands of ancient files are neatly tucked away for safe keeping.
The Muskingum County Records Center is a place little known to many, and, to fewer, what its purpose even is. Centuries-worth of court documents, marriage certificates, land deeds and other public records are housed there, with little interaction from the public.
There are laws that prevent governments from destroying old records before a certain point, but curious individuals come in every now and then to do a little history-seeking of their own.
Those are always the best days for Lucretia Frame, supervisor of the Muskingum County Records Center.
"We have seen a lot of interesting cases," Frame said. "You never really know what you're going to find."
Now, thousands of those documents are available to the public at their fingertips.
The records center was recently honored by the Ohio Historical Records Advisory Board for their work imaging and uploading documents for the public to see directly on www.familysearch.org, a website that allows the public to access family trees and genealogical archives for free.
While the records center may not be rife with the coveted family photos often found on ancestry websites, even small things like proof of a land sale can be an important piece of the puzzle.
"It just makes it easier to get items to track ancestors and descendants back," Frame said.
It all started when the late Muskingum County Clerk of Courts Todd Bickle approached the records center with a proposition: Get the documents out of the dusty basement and into the hands of interested individuals.
Bickle, an advocate for public record access, wanted to share those documents. Family Search seemed like the best place to do it with a free and easy platform.
In January 2019, the team dug in. Volunteers and staffers started scanning papers row by row, box by box. By the time they wrapped up the project a little over a year later, they were able to gather civil cases from 1852 to 1900, divorce records from 1901 to 1999 and criminal records from 1852 to 1901.
While they don't seem like much, they can make a big difference in tracing history and finding the truth about your family, Frame said.
"A lot of people were told so-and-so were together forever, but they can find out they actually weren't," she said of divorce record discoveries.
Some interested parties still venture into the basement seeking information about their families. Frame recalls helping individuals, some from other parts of the country, trace their roots to Muskingum County.
Even small discoveries, like seeing a document where an ancestor was identified as a "Jr.," could be a major component in piecing together a long-last family tree.
Scanning all those documents day after day, month after month was a long process: "It seemed like every time we got imaging done, it seemed like something else would need to be scanned," she said. But if it helped connect the dots for someone out there, it was worth it.
You can find the Muskingum County Records Center in the Richard D. Hixson Court & Government Services Building, located at 22 N. Fifth St. in Zanesville.
ecouch@gannett.com
740-334-3522
Twitter: @couchreporting
This article originally appeared on Zanesville Times Recorder: Historic Muskingum County documents now on Family Search website
