Clerk gives update on condition of county archives

A small locked room, behind the reception area of the Cass County Clerk/Register office in the county annex, contains nearly 200 years of history.

Members of the county’s top leadership were given a special peek inside the county’s archives Thursday, led by Clerk Monica Kennedy. Attendees were given a look at where the government stores its legal, marriage, land, birth and other essential records that have been compiled since the county’s birth in early 19th Century.

With entries ranging as far back as 1830, the room’s record books and microfilms are a repository of information, chronicling the history of the men and women who called the area home.

“We have all of Cass County stored behind here,” Kennedy said. “Whether you want to know who lived, died, got married or had land here, we have all that information here.”

Despite the protection of a steel vault door, the archives are face a significant risk: not from intruders, but from the natural forces of deterioration.

Due to the room’s lack of ventilation and temperature control, dealing with humidity during the summer months is a constant struggle for Kennedy and her staff, as it poses a threat to the integrity of the records.  In one of corners of the archive sits a small dehumidifier, which the staff empties twice a day during the year’s hottest months.

“It’s a definite problem,” Kennedy said. “A lot of predecessors tried to do something about it as well, but so far nothing has been done.”

Another issue the staff contends with is monitoring visitors to the archive itself, as only a single camera is installed to allow staff to keep an eye on people inside the vault. While most of the people interested in viewing historical records are used to handling old documents, some have attempted to forgo charges associated with copying certain pages by capturing them using flash photography, which can damage the documents, Kennedy said.

The clerk’s office is looking to create a copy of its microfilm index, which would cost around $10,000.

While it has digital versions of records from the past few decades, the cost and time associated with digitizing all of its existing records makes that option impossible for the time being.

“A lot of these are the original and only copy,” Kennedy said. “We would be in big trouble if anything were to happen to them.”