COURTS: ARCHIVE CENTER TO HAVE OPEN HOUSE SUNDAY

JACKSON, Mo. -- All of Cape Girardeau County's court records, land deeds and tax records will be in one place when the new county archive center opens in April.

It will take almost six months to move those historical documents, some of which date back to 1790 when the county was founded.

The County Commission is hosting an open house at 1:30 p.m. Sunday at the center, 112 E. Washington St., before the moving begins. Missouri Secretary of State Rebecca McDowell Cook and Maria Hines, grant coordinator for local records programs, will attend the open house.

Jane Randol Jackson, center director, said she is excited about what sort of treasures she might find as the records are moved.

"We have a pretty complete set of county records and ours are some of the oldest in the state," she said.

Those records include tax and assessor records, some marriage, birth and death certificates and even some Missouri territorial records. Some of the records are written in French, others in Spanish and include correspondence from Don Louis Lorimier, the county's founder.

Few of the county recorder's documents will be moved to the new center since the recorder's office staff routinely use those documents, which also are available to the public for research.

The county has been working on a plan to build a records storage center for more than two years. It was needed to house all the mounds of paper, maps and permanent records the county is required to keep. Sides Construction Co. was hired in January for the building project, which cost $489,333.

Since no central building was available until now, the county has been storing its records in the basements, hallways and closets of its buildings and in the bell towers at both the Common Pleas Courthouse in Cape Girardeau and the County Courthouse in Jackson. Some are even at Kent Library on the campus of Southeast Missouri State University.

With a new building, all the records will be accessible for research, Randol Jackson said. The building also offers a temperature- and humidity-controlled atmosphere.

The county has 4,000 cubic feet of records and 3,000 cubic feet of them will be available for researchers. Some documents, such as adoption records and some sealed court documents, are not open to public researchers.

Many of the documents are stored on microfilm so that researchers have immediate access. With a new microfilm reader and printer, the public will have a chance to find the documents and then send that microfilm image to themselves via e-mail.