Thinking locally
I’ve been thinking a great deal about local issues and information. How they intersect and how local governments share and distribute information.
In our Town, most of the records and forms you would need to do just about anything are held tightly in paper form at the Town House. Not because of any fear of getting anything out but because that’s how things are done and to change involves not only cost but time. Imagine taking 100+ years of property records and digitizing them. Even in a town of less than 5,000 the cost is unimaginable.
The problem for many small communities like Pound Ridge is that as more and more people move here from New York City and the lower suburbs, they demand more and more of the services they’ve grown used to in their previous home towns. They want activities for their pre-school aged children, a place for their teenagers to go after school, a conveniently scheduled yoga class at the library and they want it all without having to increase taxes.
And apart from all the physical and programatic needs, they want information from the Town government. If they want to expand their house they need to get the original site survey and plans from the Town House and fill out an application for a building permit. The permit application is online but the site surveys and plans are held in files, some so old they risk falling apart to the touch.
Another story: last year I had to get duplicate copies of our children’s birth certificates. I went to the Town Hall of the Town they were born in, walked up two flights of stairs to a dusty old room with “Official Records” stamped on the door. There, inside of two metal cabinets, were all the records of every birth and death in history of the Town of Sleepy Hollow, New York. All handwritten in giant ledger books.
Imagine the consequences of a fire. Imagine the possibilities of identity theft. Imagine the cost to safeguard and then digitize all those records so they can be examined, crossed referenced and stored for perpetuity.
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Geneology is one of the areas where users are making a huge difference. In the UK, there is a huge effort by volunteers to digitise all the Birth, Marriage and Death records. They’ve now been overtaken by the official sources, but they are still free. Volunteers also do a lot of the parish records.