The Canon City, Colorado, Clerk and Recorder's Office has lost a book!
Well, maybe that's too deep of a dive! LOL!!! Years ago, I started researching the Cotopaxi Jewish Colony. I visited the Clerk & Recorder's Office and went through the Grantor/Grantee index and started writing down books I needed to look at. This was long before they digitized their records.
There was a book simply titled AL or "A of L" in the index. I asked one of the gals for it and she came back and said she couldn't find it, it must have been an error in the index. When I showed her 5 different pages that referenced this book, she decided to go look again.
I remember that day well. She would come back up from the basement every half hour and report to me that she was still looking. I was busy doing other research so I didn't mind. At 4:30 pm, she found it! It was a tiny narrow journal and had been stuck between 2 large journals. She said that she had worked there 33 years and no one had asked to see this journal.
For me, it was a land mine - an explosion filled with everything I needed to prove oral histories! As I sat and thumbed through the journal...all legal jargon about mine liens, lawsuits and more, I decided to pay to have almost the entire journal copied.
I missed a page or 2. So about a year later, I went back and asked to see the journal again. This time, the news was rather devastating. I was told that the journal had been sent to the National Archives to be digitized and it had been lost. They were hoping it would be found.
Oh my gosh! How lucky am I that I made copies of it!
Yesterday, I was back doing a bit more research. Everything has been digitized and computerized. I love it! I happened to run across an entry for the miner's lien out of that journal, so I popped over to the desk and asked if they had ever recovered the AL journal. No.....it is gone forever.
So I told them the story and that I had copies of the journal and offered the copies to them. They said that they couldn't accept them. That they could only use documents in their possession.
Sort of weird as I really did get my copies from them and have the receipt to prove it.
One of these days, I will make a copy of my copies and donate them to the local History Center. But how sad....someone going to the clerk and recorder's office will never know where to go to find them. There is no link between the 2 offices. Someone will go in, look at the grantee/grantor book, see the names, request the AL journal, and be told that it doesn't exist.
Be still my heart! As a researcher, this devastates me. As a genealogist, it slightly infuriates me. I am offering them copies of something I got from them in order to help future genealogists and they are declining my offer.
I am writing this so that you will know.....if you run into a dead end, look around the corner. Here in Canon City, go to the History Center on Hwy 50. And try to remember - employees clock in at 8 am and out at 4 pm. It is just a job to them. There is no compassion and they don't really concern themselves with a tiny little insignificant lost journal!
Why is this important at all? The family stories of the descendants of the Cotopaxi Colony claim that the Jews were tricked into going to Cotopaxi. They were lured with stories of how great farming would be when a man named Saltiel only wanted them to work in their mines. They were tricked. They ended up working in his mines to survive....and then he didn't pay them.
This lien does 2 things. It provides the names of some of the members of the colony, and it shows how many hours they worked without pay. Some worked 2 1/2 months without receiving their pay. Can you imagine doing that today?
They got together as a group and put a lien against Saltiel's mine to stake a claim for their wages.
You can see the entire document on the Cotopaxi-Colony website.
So even though I acquired this from the local Clerk and Recorder's office, you cannot go there to verify my research.....other than to see the document, 10869, still listed in the index books. Fortunately, it is listed in each index with the name of each miner, so I don't think that will ever be removed.
Lost from the Clerk and Recorder's office.....but not lost from the world! Ah! gotta love research snafus!
Edited - February 19, 2016
I woke up at 2 am this morning with a realization of the significance of the "loss" of the book A of L by the Clerk and Recorder's office. Is this a crime???
A of L was book "A" of Liens. The entire book was liens against early mine claims in Fremont County.
How very convenient that this book is found after not being looked at for 33 years....and then it miraculously turns up "lost"....."forever"! Liens against a mine that have not been resolved could easily alter the course of ownership to the present day. Title insurance companies could go broke because they "insured" that the property was clear. An entire book of liens - found - could create a nightmare for the assessor's office, the clerk and recorder's office....I think the list might be endless!!!
And so the book was "lost".
And although I have copies of most of the liens in this book - if you were to do a title search to the property - and you do not have the original lien....you would be screwed because the lien is no longer in the clerk and recorder's office.
And absolutely no one is held accountable for this crime! I am sure everyone who works there is thinking that no one will ever question them some 134 years later. I am now wondering if this book was ever actually sent to the national archives to be recorded....or was it tossed in the trash? Small town Canon City - people "take care of business" their own way?
WOW!
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