
160-Year-Old Documents Intentionally Destroyed in Franklin County, N.C. - minikites
http://stumblingintheshadowsofgiants.wordpress.com/2013/12/21/160-year-old-documents-intentionally-destroyed-in-franklin-county-n-c/
======
fit2rule
One thing about America that a lot of folks don't understand is that - even if
you have paid off your property debts - you don't actually own that property
until the title has been cleared and transferred to you.

 _EVEN IF_ you have paid your mortgage in full, in many cases, there will not
be clear title to the property - and thus, you cannot legally own the
property.

Title Insurance companies know this, as do most banks. This is why there is a
~$70 "Title Clearance and/or Reconveyance Fee" that has to be paid at the end
of the mortgage - by the borrower - to the Title Insurance company.

America has a huge backlog of uncleared title. In some counties, there are 2
or 3 or even up to 12 generations of title to get cleared - from the earliest
title transfer, to the very latest - before someone can have clear title to
their property.

So, like the original author of this article, I suspect that there was some
Title Lineage evidence in all that stack of documents, which someone didn't
want to have discovered .. for some reason.

The lesson learned: ALWAYS CLEAR TITLE ON PROPERTY YOU INTEND TO PURCHASE.

~~~
mattlutze
So, published 3 days before the OP's post (see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7017552](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7017552)):
[http://www.wral.com/historians-lament-destruction-of-
frankli...](http://www.wral.com/historians-lament-destruction-of-franklin-
county-records/13229922/)

Which says the records were burned because they were full of mold, a health
hazard, and had already been designated for destruction in 1964.

This wasn't a nifty little storage room full of rare old materials, it was
pile of boxes in a basement with a leaky pipe.

It's sad for sure that a few really cool documents were lost, but they needed
to be destroyed to remove the mold threat -- I doubt it was economically
feasible to clean or restore the lot of them, and it'd have been dangerous to
have folks rummage through them to find things worth restoration (can you
remove mold from a ledger book?).

~~~
Asparagirl
Mold threat?! Hahahahaha, this is what archivists _do_. We rescue and restore
shit. We fumigate books with bugs living in the pages. We are to this day
_still_ piecing together charcoal smudges from the infamous 1973 St. Louis
fire, to reconstruct scraps of salvageable information from WWI military
records. We fight with archives in Eastern Europe that are staffed _to this
day_ with corrupt former KGB members who would rather stonewall you than give
you your great-grandfather's shtetl records _even when you are willing to pay
them for access_.

Even in the very worst case scenario, all we need is a hazmat suit and a
digital camera and a couple of hours so the data isn't 100% lost -- as it was
lost in Franklin county.

~~~
raverbashing
This

The mold talk sounds like a petty excuse. Like we live in a world with no
protection masks.

This is mold, not Fukushima debris

~~~
chc
Mold can be considerably more dangerous than a lot of the artifacts of
Fukushima that people have been worrying about.

~~~
ewams
Source?

------
Asparagirl
Hi, I'm the genealogy geek who first posted to HN about this story three days
ago, just before the HN downtime, in the thread about Canada's similarly
horrible records destruction:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7010885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7010885)

Since then, the story has gone viral on Twitter and is now back on HN as a
post in its own right. And yet there were people like me who knew (and
tweeted!) about the impending records destruction through the genealogy
grapevine _before_ the burning -- but we felt powerless to do anything about
it.

If ever there were an example of how important it is for us genealogy/archives
folks to break out of our little world and interface more with the general
public more often, this would be it. I'm so glad people here, and on Twitter,
seem to really grasp what a big deal stories like this are, and how shameful
it is to have destroyed records.

Now, pull up a chair and let me explain to you all about the worrying trend of
privatization and commercialization of public archives and public data, or the
saga of the SSDI closure...

------
throwaway_yy2Di
I'll paste a comment I made in an HN thread a few days ago, since this seems
to be the same blog post:

Not exactly the "full story" when it omits the facts that support differing
conclusions. That's sort of the opposite of "full story".

Some moderating details:

* Documents were damaged by a mold that is hazardous to health

* State archivist claims the documents were of "low historical value"

* Archivist claims some were confidential, and couldn't be legally released to 3rd party

[http://www.wral.com/historians-lament-destruction-of-
frankli...](http://www.wral.com/historians-lament-destruction-of-franklin-
county-records/13229922/)

~~~
minikites
See Asparagirl's great comments about this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7017891](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7017891)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7018441](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7018441)

------
dded
Another, of course speculative, motivation may have been that the destroyed
records could have thrown existing land ownership into legal doubt.

EDIT: The article speculates a cover-up. I'm speculating a make-this-messy-
problem-go-away action, perhaps by someone who'd have to deal with the mess as
opposed to someone who'd be embarrassed by it. On the other hand, I'm not
denying that it's a cover-up.

~~~
Major_Grooves
Isn't that what the article itself speculates?

~~~
bbllee
The article focuses on the potential harm to one or more prominent families'
reputations; as you deduce, this kind of evidence would not only harm
reputations but may also complicate land ownership.

------
mhurron
> Prove me wrong. You can’t. They destroyed the records.

I love it.

Personally I believe these records showed that the Union had assistance from
their extra-terrestrial masters and held the documentation of a coverup after
the Civil War.

Prove me wrong. You can’t. They destroyed the records.

~~~
runarberg
– _All things being equal, the simpler explanation tends to be the true_ –

There exist a big culture and history of land theft in the Americas by the
white upper class from the 16th century until present time. Now there exist no
evidence of extra-terrestrials.

So I personally belief the post's explanation over yours.

~~~
mhurron
There is just as much evidence of extra-terrestrials as there is that this was
to protect the reputation of 'someone' from something someone who is long dead
and buried once did.

No one cares if your great-great-great-great grandfather was a slave owner. If
they did, it would come up far more often.

I can also counter your adage with another:

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

The simplest answer is actually stupidity. Someone(s) didn't know what they
had and just freed up space that was taken up by records that were long past
their retention period.

------
DanielBMarkham
The best of the internet: breathless, half-informed, speculative, and
emotionally-manipulative.

More information, please. Otherwise this isn't much more than a rumor from a
backyard gossip.

~~~
minikites
[http://www.wral.com/historians-lament-destruction-of-
frankli...](http://www.wral.com/historians-lament-destruction-of-franklin-
county-records/13229922/)

------
saalweachter
Saying that books have mold on them is like saying that dogs have fleas on
them. Condemning them for that reason is like throwing a pack of stray dogs
into the incinerator for having fleas. After all, fleas are a hazard to human
health -- the bubonic plague was spread by fleas.

It is indeed possible that the cost to restore these books may have been
prohibitive, far out of proportion to their historical value, but the cost to
_preserve_ them was certainly not. All they would need to do is freeze them.
It deactivates the mold, and prevents continuing harm. The books could sit
there, not hurting anyone, until someone cared enough to restore them.

------
viraptor
Without going into the actual issue of destroying the documents, I find the
preservation process slightly disappointing. From the timeline:

* Late May, early June, 2013 – Work began, using a few volunteers,...

* August 5, 2013 ... A request was made to The United Way to supply the Society with computers and Steve Trubilla donated a scanner/copier.

They had months while they could (even just to make the reviews easier) simply
scan everything. Page by page while going through the boxes. They didn't have
to retype, OCR, describe or do anything else to the documents. Just copy and
preserve.

Now they're caught in a disaster situation without a backup. (I'm not
disappointed with people doing this, I'm sure they did what they could /
thought was important at the time. Just the whole situation is depressing.
It's like almost every single "we lost all our data" story out there.)

~~~
brudgers
Franklin County North Carolina has 60,000 people. Typically, rural historical
societies are neither staffed nor equipped to handle significant archival
tasks - often they are a mix of younger reinactors and artisans, and older
folk interested in curating. That they did not own a scanner suggests the
sophistication of the organization.

From the article, it sounds as if they were trying to follow sound archival
practices - e.g. contacting the State Bureau. There was no reason for them to
know they were in a race against the clock, and it is absurd to propose that
they should have acted in such a way or to violated sound archival practice.

~~~
king_jester
> Franklin County North Carolina has 60,000 people. Typically, rural
> historical societies are neither staffed nor equipped to handle significant
> archival tasks - often they are a mix of younger reinactors and artisans,
> and older folk interested in curating. That they did not own a scanner
> suggests the sophistication of the organization.

This is absolutely the typical case. Archiving various kinds of documents is
hard. Professional archivists generally have a Masters degree in Library
Science or a similar field. When there are many kinds of records (paper,
photo, etc) it is difficult to start the process and handle things correctly.

~~~
brudgers
In this case, it appears that a portion of the documents were in an unstable
condition and thus, there was good reason to focus first on preservation over
reproduction, dissemination, and interpretation.

------
dded
Lesson learned for me: if I ever discover a trove of old documents, I'll
contact the historical society, but I'll also contact a couple of newspapers.

~~~
waterlesscloud
The happy thing these days is it's easy for everyone to make photographic
copies for themselves.

Even if they don't legally stand up, the photos would cause plenty of
publicity issues.

~~~
keithpeter
I was wondering why no highish res photos of the _outside_ appearance of the
documents at least, simply as a sort of inventory of what was there, and
perhaps any dates, titles, case names on the document envelopes.

I can understand a reluctance to actually open any folded documents in dockets
that have been stored in damp conditions and left for 100+ years. I've
recently scanned and photographed some documents relating to my family from
the 1880s, these have been stored in a tin box and were very dry and fragile.
We are just keeping them in the box at present!

------
jspc
I think its more likely the documents were the original street plans and
guides which, when viewed from sufficient distance above, spell out the name
of the last remaining descendant of Jesus and was designed by Da Vinci
himself.

 _Prove me wrong. You can’t. They destroyed the records._

------
bbllee
Could a lawyer (preferably from NC) chime in about real estate law and if
there's something like a "statute of limitations"? Would adverse possession
(or something like it) in effect wipe away any crime committed in coming to
possess a piece of land?

~~~
brudgers
[IANAL]

They are two separate legal issues: responsibility for a criminal offense and
rightful title to a particular piece of real property.

One way of thinking about the difference is that one can be inherited and the
other can't [currently]. In legal parlance, criminal v civil tort.

------
mcv
First book burnings in Canada, now in North Carolina. I expect new witch hunts
in the New World.

~~~
mattlutze
They were burned to abate an invasive mold problem, not cover up mysterious
Nicolas Cage movie plots.

~~~
bdcravens
As has been pointed out elsewhere, it wouldn't be that hard to throw on safety
gear and spend a few days with a digital camera.

When homes have mold issues, great time and money is expended to clean and
repair the homes; they don't instantly demolish them. Why? The value. So it
was determine this mold was so bad, and the documents so inconsequential, that
instant incineration was the only answer?

~~~
bonemachine
Agreed. It doesn't take a conspiratorial mindset to suspect that something's
amiss here. It suffices to apply Occam's razor.

What's interesting is that the poster above simply keeps asserting, over and
over, that it was "because of the mold, ya know" as if the surprise
incineration was an obvious, necessary result of the situation. Clearly it
wasn't.

------
malka
The message is clear : do not trust the governement (or the state)

~~~
salgernon
Although the state was in fact responsible for preserving the documents in the
first place. In fact, for requiring documentation of transfers. I think the
message is: someone in North Carolina needs to go to jail.

------
hoopism
I suspect these records had something to do with the HN server outage and PG
ordered them destroyed.

Prove me wrong. You can't. They destroyed the documents.

------
blazespin
Oh, the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. The existential immaturity of
these actors is profound.

