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The Texas
Country Reporter television show did a wonderful segment on the San
Augustine County Historical Foundation's work in preserving these
important historical records.
We are
providing the video segment on the Foundation's work here courtesy of
Bob Phillips and the folks at Texas Country Repoter.
This file
is in the WMV format and is 12.32 megs in size so a broadband
connection should be used if possible.
Download Instructions:
For
Internet Explorer users, RIGHT click on the link below and select
'Save Target As' from the pop-up menu. The Desktop is a convienent
download loaction.
For
Netscape or Firefox users, RIGHT click on the link below and select
'Save Link As' from the pop-up menu.
DOWNLOAD
WMV
The
following is a transcript of a television newspot by KTRE in
Nacogdoches, Texas:
10/28/03 - Nacogdoches
Computerized
Archival System
by Donna McCollum
History is
in the making in San Augustine County. Local Historians are
preserving information from millions of historical county records in
a way that no other county has.
About 2
years ago historians recognized a very serious occurrence. Old legal
documents written with pen and quill are literally crumbling away.
Across the
street from the historic San Augustine County Courthouse is the
Records Restoration Project run by the San Augustine County
Historical Foundation, where information from the deteriorating
documents can be found on computer screens.
The
foundation secured grants totaling $425,000 to retrieve, restore,
microfilm, digitize and index all of the legal documents of San
Augustine County.
Better yet,
there's instant retrieval of each and every name found in the
documents. Data entry employee Missi Bass pulled up a familiar name
in seconds.
"You
see right here this is where Sam Houston was elected governor with
194 votes," Bass said.
Hundreds of
other Houston references were listed.
"We
can research something so much more accurately, so much faster than
ever going over to the courthouse and looking through the old
records," explained Project Director Neal Murphy.
Bass and
three other workers spend hours indexing the names. Bass joked that
she didn't need glasses until after getting this job.
"When
you first started it's really interesting. But a lot of times you're
thinking, okay, just get through it, I'm tired of working on this
probate, lets move on to something else," Bass said
There have
been some interesting discoveries during the course of the research project.
For
example, several of San Augustine's historic homes that date back to
the early 1800's have been traced back to their original land grant.
The
historic foundation is nearing the end of the two year project, but
the foundation hopes to remain busy by conducting research for
individuals for the reasonable fee of $35.00 - $65.00.
For more
information about the documents go to www.sarecords.org
Source: www.ktre.com
Copyright
2003 KTRE.com / KTRE-TV / Liberty Corporation. All rights reserved.
[Used with permission.] |
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Here is a
reprint of an article that ran in the Beaumont Enterprise, a major
newspaper in Beaumont, Texas.
By Shane Graber
San
Augustine - In an old dress shop on this county seat's square, Neal
Murphy sat at an average-looking computer.
"Let's
try 'Sam Houston," he said, typing in a name. "That's a
pretty familiar name in Texas."
Instantly,
the computer brought up dozens of hits. But his wasn't a simple
Internet search. Murphy was checking about 1.5 million San Augustine
County records dating back to the 1800's.
"See
there?" Murphy said, grinning. "See how fast that came up?"
Murphy was
testing what is believed to be the most thorough, far-reaching county
government archive system in the state, according to experts in the field.
For the
past two years, Murphy and his employees have fed every available
county document into a $450,000 system that now holds records on
everything from Spanish land grants to current divorce cases.
"We
found everything." Murphy said. "You name it."
And he
means everything. Up until the 1930's, most of the records, many of
which were in Spanish, were hand-written.
"They're
probably the first county that has everything going back to when the
county was born," said Jerry Anderson, president and chief
executive officer of ImageTek, a Waco company that specializes in
county archive systems. "Without a doubt."
"The
project is nearly complete," Murphy said as he and three
employees - Missi Bass, 35, Wanda Leoni, 36 and Mae Murphy, 65 -
entered data into the system one day last week.
Multi-colored
books and ledgers, many of them waterstained, dust and faded, are
stacked on tables and shelves in the large, cavernous office. Pages
struggle to release themselves from decades-old binds.
The old
dress shop still has several mirrors hanging through-out the room.
Many of the
records have been interesting, if not a bit amusing. A woman demanded
in love letters from the 1800's that a man give her a Christmas
present whether he was involved in a divorce case or not, Leoni said.
Welfare
records from the 1930's showed exactly what a person owned, she
added. The records even detailed whether the person's home was clean
and how many canned goods were in the house.
During the
Civil War, documents showed that some people paid others to fight in
the war for them, Bass said.
"Here's
one woman who's been married five times, " Bass said.
"First one died. Second one died. Third one died. Fourth one
died. The last one was alive when she died. I guess you could say he
survived her."
This county
was once plagued by men who shot dice in outhouses and women who made
moonshine, too, according to the records they've seen.
"Yeah,
the laws were a lot different back then," Leoni said. For years
county records had languished in the courthouse and in a warehouse.
The San
Augustine County Historical Foundation had worried for some time
about the deteriorating shape.
So two
years ago the San Augustine County Historical Foundation appointed a
committee to consider ways to preserve the records. The commission
hired Murphy as the project director.
The Gill
Foundation and the Summerlee Foundation, both of Dallas, picked up
the entire cost of the project. The project opened shop in the J. P.
Mathews building on the square at 208 W. Columbia two years ago in July.
Murphy's
team first took months to transfer to microfilm every county document
by photographing each page. Those pages were transferred to computer
discs. Murphy then bought a laser printer, a server and five computers.
Murphy's
staff of four then went through the documents to find names and index
them into the computer system. A Spanish-speaking woman assisted on
the Spanish documents.
When the
user types in a name, the system immediately identifies all documents
in which the name appears and what type of document it is. The check
takes just seconds.
"It's
just amazing," Murphy said. "It really is."
Every
Friday, the 43-trillion-byte server takes 18 hours to back up the
accumulated information.
The system
will eventually support itself financially, Murphy hopes. The
foundation will charge $35 to search a name, and charge additional
rates for printouts and research labor.
"We
can do something for them in a minute that they would spend hours or
days doing in the courthouse," Murphy said.
A picture
of Murphy's father, Cecil Murphy, sits in the window of the old dress
shop watching over the project. Cecil Murphy, who died in 1991, was
the county clerk here from 1938 until he retired in 1976.
Murphy
practically grew up in the courthouse, and he remembers his father
encouraging the county to preserve its history back in the '60s.
"Of
course, they didn't have the technology we do now, and .... I guess
they just never did have the money," Murphy said. "But he
would be thoroughly pleased."
For more
information call 936-288-3111 or visit the project's wweb site at www.sarecords.org.
Reach this
reporter at:
(409)
833-3311, ext. 414sgraber@beaumontenterprise.com |
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