Shelton is storing the past
And one of the main projects his office is working on is the digitalization of all of their records that are currently on microfilm.
“For about five or six years, we’ve been back indexing. Which means we’ve been typing in the indexing information and then manually scanning deeds of trust and the documents we have here. Physically doing that.” Shelton said.
Shelton began doing a little research in order to find an easier, more efficient way to digitalize the records in his office.
“Turns out there’s a company that can take microfilm and convert it to digital image.” said Shelton.
After evaluation, that method proved feasible and Shelton went in front of County Commission to present to them how the process worked and why it mattered.
County Commission, including once Register of Deeds, Rick Meredith, approved the project.
“There was really only one company that the state of Tennessee had approved and it was a company out of California.” Shelton explained.
The first set of records to be made digital are a set that date from 1802 all the way to 1884.
So Shelton sent his microfilm to P.F.A., Inc. in Sun Valley, California and it came back in the form of a CD-ROM. The disk contained 16,306 images.
Shelton then takes the disk and imports the images into his office’s system.
The images are then run through a program called IrfanView, where they can be viewed, edited organized and converted. Using IrfanView, they took all the separate images and filed them into one “book,” that they can index for ease of use.
“The people showing the greatest interest are our genealogists.” Shelton said.
Shelton also stated that this is a huge advantage for the school as well. By making the documents that much more accessible to the students means they can learn about history that much easier.
He noted one specific document now online that students find interesting is a document showing that Andrew Jackson sold land in Anderson County.
“This is absolutely the easiest and quickest way for someone to retrieve a document.” Shelton said, but his office will not be ridding itself of the microfilm.
“If the world flips upside down and we no longer have computers we will still have our microfilm. Even if we didn’t have electricity I could hold it up in front of a candle and project it.”
Shelton mentioned that his office was the only one in the state with this amount of digitalized records, dating back to 1802, without a subscription fee.
Shelton’s office has already had 200,000 images digitalized from microfilm and this project could be completed by the end of July.
If you would like to search for a document of just learn more visit www.andersondeeds.com. Or visit the Register of Deeds office in the Anderson County Courthouse.