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160-Year-Old Documents Intentionally Destroyed in Franklin County, N.C.
- dded 13y agoAnother, of course speculative, motivation may have been that the destroyed records could have thrown existing land ownership into legal doubt. EDIT: The article speculates a cover-up. I'm speculating a make-this-messy-problem-go-away action, perhaps by someone who'd have to deal with the mess as opposed to someone who'd be embarrassed by it. On the other hand, I'm not denying that it's a cover-up.
- Major_Grooves 13y agoIsn't that what the article itself speculates?
- mandlar 13y ago"My suspicion is that in and amongst all those now destroyed records, was a paper trail associated with one or more now-prominent, politically connected NC families that found its wealth and success through theft, intimidation, and outrageous corruption."
- bbllee 13y agoThe article focuses on the potential harm to one or more prominent families' reputations; as you deduce, this kind of evidence would not only harm reputations but may also complicate land ownership.
- username42 13y agoOr some documents about alien first contacts.
- malka 13y agoThe message is clear : do not trust the governement (or the state)
- salgernon 13y agoAlthough the state was in fact responsible for preserving the documents in the first place. In fact, for requiring documentation of transfers. I think the message is: someone in North Carolina needs to go to jail.
- blazespin 13y agoOh, the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. The existential immaturity of these actors is profound.
- dded 13y agoLesson learned for me: if I ever discover a trove of old documents, I'll contact the historical society, but I'll also contact a couple of newspapers.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoThe happy thing these days is it's easy for everyone to make photographic copies for themselves. Even if they don't legally stand up, the photos would cause plenty of publicity issues.
- keithpeter 13y agoI was wondering why no highish res photos of the outside appearance of the documents at least, simply as a sort of inventory of what was there, and perhaps any dates, titles, case names on the document envelopes. I can understand a reluctance to actually open any folded documents in dockets that have been stored in damp conditions and left for 100+ years. I've recently scanned and photographed some documents relating to my family from the 1880s, these have been stored in a tin box and were very dry and fragile. We are just keeping them in the box at present!
- dded 13y agoThe publicity should be early, to prevent the damage.
- bbllee 13y agoCould a lawyer (preferably from NC) chime in about real estate law and if there's something like a "statute of limitations"? Would adverse possession (or something like it) in effect wipe away any crime committed in coming to possess a piece of land?
- speedyrev 13y agoI don't think the law was as much of a concern as prominent people's reputations.
- brudgers 13y ago[IANAL] They are two separate legal issues: responsibility for a criminal offense and rightful title to a particular piece of real property. One way of thinking about the difference is that one can be inherited and the other can't [currently]. In legal parlance, criminal v civil tort.
- DanielBMarkham 13y agoThe best of the internet: breathless, half-informed, speculative, and emotionally-manipulative. More information, please. Otherwise this isn't much more than a rumor from a backyard gossip.
- minikites 13y agohttp://www.wral.com/historians-lament-destruction-of-franklin-county-records/13229922/ http://www.wral.com/historians-lament-destruction-of-frankli...
- fit2rule 13y agoOne thing about America that a lot of folks don't understand is that - even if you have paid off your property debts - you don't actually own that property until the title has been cleared and transferred to you. EVEN IF you have paid your mortgage in full, in many cases, there will not be clear title to the property - and thus, you cannot legally own the property. Title Insurance companies know this, as do most banks. This is why there is a ~$70 "Title Clearance and/or Reconveyance Fee" that has to be paid at the end of the mortgage - by the borrower - to the Title Insurance company. America has a huge backlog of uncleared title. In some counties, there are 2 or 3 or even up to 12 generations of title to get cleared - from the earliest title transfer, to the very latest - before someone can have clear title to their property. So, like the original author of this article, I suspect that there was some Title Lineage evidence in all that stack of documents, which someone didn't want to have discovered .. for some reason. The lesson learned: ALWAYS CLEAR TITLE ON PROPERTY YOU INTEND TO PURCHASE.
- mattlutze 13y agoSo, published 3 days before the OP's post (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7017552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7017552): http://www.wral.com/historians-lament-destruction-of-franklin-county-records/13229922/ http://www.wral.com/historians-lament-destruction-of-frankli... Which says the records were burned because they were full of mold, a health hazard, and had already been designated for destruction in 1964. This wasn't a nifty little storage room full of rare old materials, it was pile of boxes in a basement with a leaky pipe. It's sad for sure that a few really cool documents were lost, but they needed to be destroyed to remove the mold threat -- I doubt it was economically feasible to clean or restore the lot of them, and it'd have been dangerous to have folks rummage through them to find things worth restoration (can you remove mold from a ledger book?).
- ta43434 13y agothe records were burned because they were full of mold, a health hazard This sounds exactly like the perfect kind of lie that the general public would believe. A plausible sounding health/safety reason. I'm not an expert, maybe it's true, but it rings false to me. Surely historians, librarians and archaeologists have faced mold before and have methods to deal with it.
- viraptor 13y agoWithout going into the actual issue of destroying the documents, I find the preservation process slightly disappointing. From the timeline: * Late May, early June, 2013 – Work began, using a few volunteers,... * August 5, 2013 ... A request was made to The United Way to supply the Society with computers and Steve Trubilla donated a scanner/copier. They had months while they could (even just to make the reviews easier) simply scan everything. Page by page while going through the boxes. They didn't have to retype, OCR, describe or do anything else to the documents. Just copy and preserve. Now they're caught in a disaster situation without a backup. (I'm not disappointed with people doing this, I'm sure they did what they could / thought was important at the time. Just the whole situation is depressing. It's like almost every single "we lost all our data" story out there.)
- gwern 13y ago> They had months while they could (even just to make the reviews easier) simply scan everything. Page by page while going through the boxes. They didn't have to retype, OCR, describe or do anything else to the documents. Just copy and preserve. They were probably worried about damaging the books or pages. They had no idea of what was coming, so why would they damage their newfound discovery just to make a bad copy? (Usually, backup stories are good morality plays because the only cost of backup are time and money; but if you had a 0.01% chance of corrupting both copies of a file every time you copied it over to the backup drive...)
- brudgers 13y agoFranklin County North Carolina has 60,000 people. Typically, rural historical societies are neither staffed nor equipped to handle significant archival tasks - often they are a mix of younger reinactors and artisans, and older folk interested in curating. That they did not own a scanner suggests the sophistication of the organization. From the article, it sounds as if they were trying to follow sound archival practices - e.g. contacting the State Bureau. There was no reason for them to know they were in a race against the clock, and it is absurd to propose that they should have acted in such a way or to violated sound archival practice.
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- mcv 13y agoFirst book burnings in Canada, now in North Carolina. I expect new witch hunts in the New World.
- mattlutze 13y agoThey were burned to abate an invasive mold problem, not cover up mysterious Nicolas Cage movie plots.
- bdcravens 13y agoAs has been pointed out elsewhere, it wouldn't be that hard to throw on safety gear and spend a few days with a digital camera. When homes have mold issues, great time and money is expended to clean and repair the homes; they don't instantly demolish them. Why? The value. So it was determine this mold was so bad, and the documents so inconsequential, that instant incineration was the only answer?
- bonemachine 13y agoAgreed. It doesn't take a conspiratorial mindset to suspect that something's amiss here. It suffices to apply Occam's razor. What's interesting is that the poster above simply keeps asserting, over and over, that it was "because of the mold, ya know" as if the surprise incineration was an obvious, necessary result of the situation. Clearly it wasn't.
- mindslight 13y agoOh we've got plenty of those too under the CFAA.
- mhurron 13y ago> Prove me wrong. You can’t. They destroyed the records. I love it. Personally I believe these records showed that the Union had assistance from their extra-terrestrial masters and held the documentation of a coverup after the Civil War. Prove me wrong. You can’t. They destroyed the records.
- jusben1369 13y agoYou mock us now on HN but when those extra-terrestrial masters show up at your front door later tonight to silence you we'll have the last laugh!
- runarberg 13y ago–All things being equal, the simpler explanation tends to be the true– There exist a big culture and history of land theft in the Americas by the white upper class from the 16th century until present time. Now there exist no evidence of extra-terrestrials. So I personally belief the post's explanation over yours.
- mhurron 13y agoThere is just as much evidence of extra-terrestrials as there is that this was to protect the reputation of 'someone' from something someone who is long dead and buried once did. No one cares if your great-great-great-great grandfather was a slave owner. If they did, it would come up far more often. I can also counter your adage with another: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." The simplest answer is actually stupidity. Someone(s) didn't know what they had and just freed up space that was taken up by records that were long past their retention period.
- javert 13y ago> There exist a big culture and history of land theft in the Americas by the white upper class from the 16th century until present time. This sounds like something from a partisan left-wing political tract. Do you have any references? Of course, land was taken from the Native Americans and brought under the white man's legal system, at which point I no longer believe the claim. The US is basically a country of laws, not of men, or at least has been for most of its history. I don't know what the threshhold is for "a big culture of" something, but I suspect the truth of it is that it clearly falls short of that. This kind of claim is also reminiscent of the situation in Israel, which is also left-wing/anti-semitic minefield of misinformation.
- Asparagirl 13y agoHi, I'm the genealogy geek who first posted to HN about this story three days ago, just before the HN downtime, in the thread about Canada's similarly horrible records destruction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7010885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7010885 Since then, the story has gone viral on Twitter and is now back on HN as a post in its own right. And yet there were people like me who knew (and tweeted!) about the impending records destruction through the genealogy grapevine before the burning -- but we felt powerless to do anything about it. If ever there were an example of how important it is for us genealogy/archives folks to break out of our little world and interface more with the general public more often, this would be it. I'm so glad people here, and on Twitter, seem to really grasp what a big deal stories like this are, and how shameful it is to have destroyed records. Now, pull up a chair and let me explain to you all about the worrying trend of privatization and commercialization of public archives and public data, or the saga of the SSDI closure...
- workbench 13y agoDear Americans, 160 years isn't old in the slightest, who cares.
- jspc 13y agoI think its more likely the documents were the original street plans and guides which, when viewed from sufficient distance above, spell out the name of the last remaining descendant of Jesus and was designed by Da Vinci himself. Prove me wrong. You can’t. They destroyed the records.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- throwaway_yy2Di 13y agoI'll paste a comment I made in an HN thread a few days ago, since this seems to be the same blog post: Not exactly the "full story" when it omits the facts that support differing conclusions. That's sort of the opposite of "full story". Some moderating details: * Documents were damaged by a mold that is hazardous to health * State archivist claims the documents were of "low historical value" * Archivist claims some were confidential, and couldn't be legally released to 3rd party http://www.wral.com/historians-lament-destruction-of-franklin-county-records/13229922/ http://www.wral.com/historians-lament-destruction-of-frankli...
- minikites 13y agoSee Asparagirl's great comments about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7017891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7017891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7018441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7018441
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- bonemachine 13y agoSmells like plausible deniability. The "mold" claim is especially dubious.
- saalweachter 13y agoSaying that books have mold on them is like saying that dogs have fleas on them. Condemning them for that reason is like throwing a pack of stray dogs into the incinerator for having fleas. After all, fleas are a hazard to human health -- the bubonic plague was spread by fleas. It is indeed possible that the cost to restore these books may have been prohibitive, far out of proportion to their historical value, but the cost to preserve them was certainly not. All they would need to do is freeze them. It deactivates the mold, and prevents continuing harm. The books could sit there, not hurting anyone, until someone cared enough to restore them.
- hoopism 13y agoI suspect these records had something to do with the HN server outage and PG ordered them destroyed. Prove me wrong. You can't. They destroyed the documents.