Genealogical society honored by courts

Members of the Tri-County Genealogical Society were joined by three special guests Friday at the Vernon County Courthouse. Society members have just completed a project to prepare the court records for preservation by microfilming them for the state archives. The three guests, Linda Myers, field archivist, John Korasick, administrative archivist and John Dougan, state archivist were from the Missouri State Archives. The archives are a responsibility of the Missouri Secretary of State's Office. --Steve Moyer/Daily Mail

In law, a friend of the court brief is a brief filed by someone with an interest in a case but not directly part of it. Friday, some friends of the court were honored for their participation in preserving the records of nearly 50 years of court cases. For the past three and a half years the Tri-County Genealogical Society has helped the State Archives section of the Missouri Secretary of State's office to prepare the court records from the early years of Vernon County for recording on microfilm, after which the original records will be returned.

"The state archives provided the supplies for this project, provided local field staff to work with the volunteer group, as far as advising the group," John Dougan, state archivist, said. "That's the state archive's involvement is mostly in supplies and supervision, if they needed it, and then we will microfilm the records after the index is set. Then there will be a permanent copy of those records available in addition to the paper one, a duplicate copy. The original records will stay here, either in the courthouse or the genealogical society. We always encourage that."

John Korasick, the state administrative archivist, said that the reason the project concentrated on the older records was their vulnerability.

"Our main goal is to preserve the most endangered files and those tend to be the 19th century ones," Korasick said. "We do do some processing of 20th century files, but a lot of times the volunteers need a break from the work -- especially after three and a half years of flattening and cleaning and arranging files. It gives them a little time for a break."

Nancy Thompson, one of the Tri-County Genealogical Society's vice presidents, said the group got involved in the project at the invitation of the state archives.

"Actually the state archives suggested it and asked if there were volunteers in the county who would do the work," Thompson said. "They said they would provide all of the supplies, provide the microfilming but they needed people here, in this town, in this area that would be willing to undertake such a project."

Thompson said the group wasn't prepared for the reality of the project and the condition they found the records in.

"We had no idea of the massive volume of records or what would be involved," Thompson said. "The records we were working with had been stored down in the boiler room of the courthouse here they were very dirty they had coal dust on them, they were very fragile. We were trained by the state archives on how to handle these documents, how to separate the pages so they could be cleaned and microfilmed. We cleaned them and read the files so they could be indexed. It was a large project, a very large undertaking."

This is the second local project in which the state archives workers have participated. The probate records were previously archived in another project, but the Vernon County Historical Society spearheaded that project.