Whitley County Clerk digitizes plats going back to 1800s

Thanks to the miracle of technology, all of the maps and plats in the Whitley County Clerk’s Office have now been digitized and preserved for all time.

“All of the Whitley County plats that have been recorded in the clerk’s office have been digitized. It is every plat we have ever had,” said Whitley County Clerk Carolyn Willis. “The old ones were used so extensively that they were coming apart. They were able to repair those and get them digitized.”

Willis said that she isn’t sure on the exact number of plats digitized, but it totals in the thousands, including plats going back to the 1800s.

“With what has happened out in Mayfield, I feel blessed to be able to have those now all digitized. If something like that were to happen here in our county, I feel we have come along way,” she added.

Willis said the plats are regularly used when abstractors do deed searches, when surveyors are doing work to determine property boundary lines, and by officials working to put in fiber optic lines.

The plats, maps and documents are now available to be viewed online if you have a subscription to the ecclix system, which there is a charge for, Willis said.

Willis said anyone interested in subscribing to the service can contact her office or visit the office’s website at https://whitley.countyclerk.us/ for more information.

The digitized records can also be viewed digitally for free if you go to the Whitley County Clerk’s Office at the old courthouse in Williamsburg, but there is a $0.50 per page fee to print each page there.

Willis noted that several other records have now also been indexed or digitized.

Deeds have been indexed back to 1985, and have been digitized going back to 1991.

Marriage licenses have been indexed back 61 years back to 1960, and digitized  back to 1984.

Willis would like to get deeds and other documents digitized going back 60 years. She said grant money or some other funding source would be needed to do the older deed books because those books do not come apart, which makes them more difficult to digitize.

Another factor making those records more difficult to digitize is the fact that many of the older books had black pages, which don’t copy as easily, Willis noted.

“We’re working on getting more in there as we can, but a lot of those older books don’t come apart. The only way to do those would be like our maps. We had to get pictures of those made individually and convert those over,” Willis said.