ARCHIVE CENTER TO HOLD KEY TO PAST: 75 PEOPLE ATTEND OPEN HOUSE

JACKSON, Mo. -- Jane Randol Jackson knows how difficult it can be to research family history when documents are missing or are miles apart. She tried to research her family history while living in Europe.

Using documents in Cape Girardeau County was difficult because of the distance but also because the documents were so scattered. Randol Jackson hopes to remedy that problem for other researchers and genealogists by putting the county's historical records in one place -- the new Cape Girardeau County Archive Center.

About 75 people attended an open house Sunday afternoon at the Archive Center where Randol Jackson serves as the director. The building will house tons of the county's paperwork and records that are required for storage.

The new building is finished and sits ready for documents, but it will take about six months to catalog, sort and properly store the thousands of county documents collected over the years.

The problem of mounting records surfaced more than six years ago when the county realized how many filing cabinets it owned and how much paper was being used to print the documents and keep them on file, said Presiding Commissioner Gerald Jones.

"We were buying reams of paper and turning them into documents and even though we were scanning them into the computer, we still have to keep all these records in storage," he said.

The county has records dating to its founding in the 1790s. Some documents include land grants, territorial maps, Civil War records and all the county's assessor, recorder and circuit clerk records.

As soon as the documents start coming into the center and people know what's available for research, more historical records are bound to show up, said Rebecca McDowell Cook, Missouri's secretary of state.

Her office works to conserve and restore the state's historical records. Cape Girardeau County is joining the upper echelons with its new record center, she said. It is the smallest county in the state to have such a center, but "we have richer history along the Mississippi River."

The center likely will help spark an interest for more documents, and people likely will donate what their families collected, the secretary of state said. She had already heard such talk among the people at the open house Sunday.

"Once you have a place where people know they can go, all that will start to happen," she said. "It won't take many years to fill this place up."

The building has 7,500 square feet and 11 10-foot-tall shelving units to hold the documents. Microfilm is also available in a reading room for researchers.

Bernard Schaper presented the county with its first historical document gift -- a collection of maps his cousin bought at a courthouse auction in the 1930s. The county was trying to clear out space and sold many of its maps, some dating to the 1860s and Civil War era, to make space.

Schaper returned the maps to the county Sunday.

"Now I know they've got a good home," he said.