This months article was about my trip to the County Seat at Washington County, NY in December. In this article I commented on there being a separate department containing transcribed wills. Unfortunately the article was altered by the Editors at the Auburn Citizen. They do a wonderful job with minor edits in the layout process but they did not recognize the significance of the term LDS which is the universal initials used when referring to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints research center in Salt Lake City, Utah.
I had commented that the transcribed wills is what is on file in Utah, so anyone that rents the reels from their collections would not receive the original wills, they would be viewing the transcribed documents. That is relevant because there is additional information, likely on additional reels because Washington Co., NY does not store all components of an estate in the same location.
Therefore, when you read the article, the line that says:
We were instructed to report to the opposite end of the complex, only to discover that the bound books contained transcriptions (same as what is on file with Washington County).
This should read : {same as what is on file with LDS}.
Many years ago I had rented the films for Washington County Wills and the bound books are the same as what I viewed from Salt Lake City. Many people will mistake the file as complete when more information is actually on file with the County Archivist.
Due to the poor organization of their records, we were not able to cover as much ground as we had hoped. However, there is much to view and it will require a second visit to accomplish our goals. Unfortunately, it is not an environment where you can simply browse the files for clues, that is extremely labor intensive for their staff and not enough hours in the day for that kind of search.
Therefore, we had to modify our goals.
The Auburn Citizen is one of the few newspapers that allots column space to allow local historians the opportunity to write about the history of their community. The program was established by Cayuga County Historian Sheila Tucker, serving to education and to promote readers about our unique history.