Volunteers, others conduct ‘FamilySearch’ at courthouse

It takes only a few seconds for Bill and Jonice Hubbard to scan in a 100-year-old probate document.

However, they are dealing with thousands of such sheets of paper. Aided by the State Historical Society of Iowa, court and county auditor staff and the Jasper County Genealogical Society, the organization FamilySearch has the Hubbards in Newton as their Mormon mission. FamilySearch, a longstanding genealogy organization operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, sent the Hubbards to Newton to help digitize decades of Jasper County paper records.

The Hubbards, aided by volunteer help from the Jasper County Genealogical Society, have an apartment in Newton and are working in the basement of the Jasper County Courthouse, spending months turning each form and declaration into a high-resolution digital image.

“It’s not only extremely interesting to us, but we also feel it’s important work,” Bill Hubbard said. “We not only find out fascinating things about places, people and events, but we also update information that can help document steps in the history of a property and determine lineage and inheritance issues.”

Last week, the Hubbards were not only getting their usual assistance from Jasper County Genealogical Society member Diana Wagner, but also from Delpha Musgrave, a preservation specialist from the State Historical Society of Iowa. Also, Chuck Titus, a salaried FamilySearch field supervisor who lives in Fairfield, happened to be in Newton.

“We run into all sorts of situations,” Titus said. “We encounter a lot of records that were stored in basements or attics, places that got rained on or flooded, or in buildings that caught on fire. We have to make everything camera-ready.”

For Wagner, that means countless volunteer hours removing brads, clasps and other fasteners from bundles of paper certificates and records — sometimes using a small hammer. It’s tedious, assembly-type work, but it helps digitize Jasper County records and allows for cloud and other types of storage.

There is a Series I set of boxes of records that haven been prepped for the Hubbards, and Wagner is helping prep Series II at this time. That allows the Hubbards to use a 50-megapixel camera to scan records while Wagner is getting started on pulling mostly metal clips and binding off of other records.

The two series, which cover Jasper County public records from 1848 to 1925, probably involve 7,000 or 8,000 case files, Musgrave said. Musgrave offered great thanks to Jasper County Clerk of Court Carol Sage and her staff for their help in getting records together. Not all of the county’s records that need digitizing were in one convenient building or area.

“The clerk of the court is the custodian of the probate case files,” Musgrave said. “Carol and her staff have been extremely helpful in answering our questions and helping us gain access to the records in the archives off-site storage area.”

Musgrave said the Jasper County Auditor’s office is the fourth player in the project, as she’s grateful for the help from every organization. She said FamilySearch.org trains people like the Hubbards to do the imaging, and it really helps to have a volunteer like Wagner, who knows last names and has a more localized knowledge of the history of Jasper County.

Titus said they tend to work from the oldest records toward the newest in a series, as the oldest records tend to be the most vulnerable.

The Hubbards have made a home in the Salt Lake City area, Bill has family ties to Iowa, and Janice’s great-grandmother was born in Keokuk. Bill Hubbard said Series I of the records are about 95 percent ready to be photographed.

“We learn lots of interesting facts along the way,” Hubbard said. “We learn about wars and their impact, how much land and property values have changed, and things like immigration patterns.”

Contact Jason W. Brooks at 641-792-3121 ext. 6532 or jbrooks@newtondailynews.com