Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2003
Genealogists discover hidden treasure in old chancery vault
Marriage records date to Civil War era
by Lucy Schultze
The Oxford EAGLE
Tucked away in a quiet third floor corner of the Lafayette
County Courthouse, two friends have been preserving the history of
local families as a tedious, time-consuming labor of love.
After nearly two months of work, Tricia Young and Maralyn
Bullion are now approaching the halfway mark in a project to preserve
and catalog thousands of local marriage records that date back from
1861 into the early 1900s.
The marriages from these decades are already recorded in
bound volumes and microfilmed, but the newly discovered stash of
records includes original marriage licenses as well as bond
certificates that were required of men getting married in those early
years.
"It's full of lots and lots of pioneer names," said Young, a
local genealogist whose family was among the first settlers in the
area. In the course of their work, both she and Bullion have found
their great-grandfathers' marriage certificates among the stacks of
yellowed, crumbling documents.
Being able to recognize so many of the old family names has
helped the pair decipher the flowing script in the faded records,
many of which were simply handwritten without the use of a
fill-in-the-blanks form.
Young discovered the records this past spring in an old vault
next to what was previously the purchasing office inside the
courthouse. Stored there decades ago and forgotten, they were
unearthed while Young was pulling old chancery records to be
microfilmed and cataloged by Mormon missionaries with the
Genealogical Society of Utah.
As the microfilm project continues, Young and Bullion have
begun preserving the marriage certificates, carefully unfolding them
one by one. Each document must be delicately wiped with a damp cloth
to remove dirt and dust from the surface and restore some moisture to
the dry sheets so that they can be pressed flat without tearing.
They are then slid into plastic sleeves and stored by year in
wide three-ring binders. As the project grows, the women are thinking
of switching to filing cabinets - they've already used more than
3,000 plastic sleeves and two dozen binders.
"It's going to be a mammoth amount of space they'll consume
when we're finished," Bullion said this morning.
The women have received permission from both the circuit
clerk and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to store
the documents in the genealogy room at the Lafayette County and
Oxford Public Library. There, the records will aid people researching
their local roots.
As the project continues, the women have found marriage
records from different years filed together, and believe records from
some years may be missing altogether. It's also possible the records
will include those for marriages that may have been left out of the
bound volumes.
"There's no telling what we'll find," Young said. "It's just
incredible how much pleasure you get from finding these old papers."