Name a place in Greene County where you can find a hand drawn map of a crime scene, a seed from a Red Buckeye tree, and emancipation records from the 1800’s.
The correct answer is the Greene County Records and Archives.
Records manager and archivist Robin Heise said the department only takes in records that the county creates.
“We hold all the records of historical or genealogical value going all the way back to 1803. When Ohio became a state, and Greene County became a county, and at that time Greene County spanned all the way up to lake Erie.“
In the reading room where the public part of the archives is located, Paul Griffith is looking through records with help from archives employee Lori Harris searching for records of his wife’s relatives.
“She has an ancestor, Timothy Searl, who was in the county before 1819 and so he qualifies as a founder, and we are looking up the marriage record (to) see if we can find a land record so we can complete that application,” Griffith said.
The stacks of hard bound records in this room contain a treasure trove of untold stories of the former residents of Greene County.
“We have Will records, again going back to 1803. I'll just give you an idea, ” Heise said, opening one of the red, hard-bound books lining the shelves. “These are pretty awesome, (but) if you don’t know how to read cursive or script, you are going to have a problem (reading them) .”
“What you’re looking at here is what part of the inventory was sold for,” Heise said, running down the list of items.
The inventory is detailed right down to pantry staples like bacon and sugar.
“If you're doing genealogical research, it’s kind of neat to look at the inventory and what was sold, because you can get an idea, this person was probably a farmer,” Heise said.
Elise Kelly, is sitting in front of a computer in the reading room.
Kelly is the multimedia archivist.
“We have a digital repository and a digital preservation system,” Kelly said, pointing to the computer screen.
“What we’re looking at is the emancipation records that we have, and we’ll show you later the actual paper version, but this is the digital version. Anyone in the world can look this up.”
The 1816 document on the screen is from a formerly enslaved person named Billy.
“And it goes into descriptions of what he looked like. It says ‘has he had a scar on his right wrist and right above the elbow.’ It’s kind of like their driver's license,” Kelly explained. "So when they came here to Ohio, that was a free state, they still had to show their freedom papers in order for people to understand that they are emancipated slaves.”
Later Heise shows me the large, black, hard-bound book containing the original emancipation records from 1805 - 1845.
“I kid you not, whenever a fire alarm goes off here, I grab this record and run out the door,” Heise said, laughing. “Because if this place burns, I at least want to save this. It has been digitized, but still, this is our most valuable record as far as I’m concerned.”
One of my favorite things from our tour today are the hand drawn crime scene maps from the 1800’s.
“I mentioned Washington Galloway as an early surveyor — that we had his field books,” Heise explained. “We also have a lot of his early maps. So as I was going through these I realized that this was actually a survey map of a murder that happened in Greene County. If you think about it, at the time they didn’t have cameras, they couldn’t take a photograph of the scene. So they called the county surveyor in to sketch a platt map of the murder scene."
Heise unfolds a piece of plain paper that has a hand drawn map on it showing a scene from Bath Township in the 1860s.
It looks much like you would imagine someone drawing a treasure map, with little trees marking an orchard, houses, barns, paths and other landmarks.
“And you can see here, this is where they found the body laying in the orchard, they found a gun here, and they found a basket over here, and here’s the corn crib,” Heise said, pointing to images on the map.
“My whole philosophy since I’ve been here is it’s the story of the people who are no longer here that’s important, and that’s been my whole goal while we’re going through the records (is) trying to tell their stories,” Heise said, looking around the room at the stacks of materials.
