160-Year-Old Documents Intentionally Destroyed in Franklin County, N.C.

http://stumblingintheshadowsofgiants.wordpress.com/2013/12/21/160-year-old-documents-intentionally-destroyed-in-franklin-county-n-c/

by minikites • 13 years ago

197 64 13 years ago

stumblingintheshadowsofgiants.wordpress.com

dded3• 13 years ago

Another, 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• 13 years ago

Isn't that what the article itself speculates?

mandlar• 13 years 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."

bbllee2• 13 years ago

The 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• 13 years ago

Or some documents about alien first contacts.

malka• 13 years ago

The message is clear : do not trust the governement (or the state)

salgernon• 13 years ago

Although 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• 13 years ago

Oh, the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. The existential immaturity of these actors is profound.

dded3• 13 years ago

Lesson 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• 13 years ago

The 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• 13 years ago

I 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!

dded3• 13 years ago

The publicity should be early, to prevent the damage.

bbllee2• 13 years ago

Could 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• 13 years ago

I don't think the law was as much of a concern as prominent people's reputations.

brudgers4• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

The 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.

minikites2• 13 years ago

http://www.wral.com/historians-lament-destruction-of-frankli...

fit2rule• 13 years ago

One 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.

mattlutze6• 13 years ago

So, published 3 days before the OP's post (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7017552): 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• 13 years ago

    the 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.

Asparagirl3• 13 years ago

Mold threat?! Hahahahaha, this is what archivists do. We rescue and restore shit. We fumigate books with bugs living in the pages. We are to this day still piecing together charcoal smudges from the infamous 1973 St. Louis fire, to reconstruct scraps of salvageable information from WWI military records. We fight with archives in Eastern Europe that are staffed to this day with corrupt former KGB members who would rather stonewall you than give you your great-grandfather's shtetl records even when you are willing to pay them for access.

Even in the very worst case scenario, all we need is a hazmat suit and a digital camera and a couple of hours so the data isn't 100% lost -- as it was lost in Franklin county.

cjslep• 13 years ago

"Designation for destruction in 1964" is a textbook example of how discrimination is still perpetuated here. We try so hard to be a progressive state (ex: RTP) but the fact is our heritage includes the enslavement of a race, and individuals today still say things that make Don Yelton look tame.

deveac• 13 years ago

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.

The two are not mutually exclusive. It appears that it was both.

antiterra• 13 years ago

The blogger does claim inventory was incomplete, so some of the documents may not have or should not have been designated for destruction. She also claims that some materials were salvageable and that there were inconsistencies with the assessment of the mold's danger.

The procedure moved along a bit too efficiently to really satisfy the basis of either side of the story.

bonemachine4• 13 years ago

It's sad for sure that a few really cool documents were lost, but they needed to be destroyed to remove the mold threat.

The "mold threat" argument is so utterly vacuous -- it's hard to imagine that anyone making it can really be taking themselves seriously. And this pooh-poohing of the documents as being merely "cool" reflects a staggering degree of ignorance about the value of primary documents in historical (and legal) research.

At the same time... it's not hard to imagine county bureaucrats thinking pretty much exactly in these terms. "Wha, a buncha photographs? Old title papers? Whoze goona be innersted in that? Someones gonna get SICK from all that ICKY mold and we might get SUED!"

Yep -- that must have been exactly what they were thinking.

jstalin• 13 years ago

This is not the case in states where a mortgage is simply a lien on the property. You receive a warranty deed, which includes a title search, and you own the property (fee simple in legal parlance). If you have a mortgage on the property, the mortgage company has a lien that can be foreclosed.

In title theory states, when you mortgage the property, the mortgagee holds title until the mortgage is paid off.

brudgers4• 13 years ago

[IANAL]

In the US, ownership of real property tends to be more complex than that, and that's what really drives the need for clear title.

The conveyance of real property is further complicated because it is regulated primarily at the state level and there are many and varied laws among the states.

In general, due to their heritage in English Common Law and origin at a time when land was granted by the sovereign, real property is conveyed with all previous restrictions on its use and disposal intact [except in such cases where the restrictions are illegal, such as prohibitions on the sale of the property to persons of particular races, religions, etc.].

This means that a violation of a particular covenant [deed restriction] gives the person conveying title [or their heirs or assigns] the right to take back the title. It is misleading to think of the ownership of real property as consistent with Lockian notions of private property. Restrictions on digital media and software licenses are probably better analogies, and it may be worth noting that these restrictions are not unprecedented in so far as real-property law provides precedent.

Ultimately, the title to real property is never clear - you can't prove that no claims exist only that none have been found.

And that's what's motivating the purported goings on in Franklin County. For all the years they were locked up, those records were not included in any title search. The existence and use of such records would undoubtedly slow the sale of real property in the area. Furthermore, the likelihood that claims against title could be brought forth against current title holders increases significantly.

Given that the records date from the antebellum period, the 800 pound gorilla is not so much the descendants of former slaves as Native Americans. North Carolina was only a generation or so off the frontier and less than that from the Trail of Tears, and while the heirs and assigns of individual former slaves are fragmented, the heirs and assigns of the various Native American nations such as the Cherokee are organized and have legal standing under Federal law to challenge property title. [1]

[1] In the 1980's the Seminole Tribe acquired a reservation that was subsequently developed into Tampa's Hard Rock Casino in exchange for giving up a claim upon land in Tampa's Central Business District where a Native American gravesite was unearthed. http://tbo.com/list/news-opinion-commentary/from-graves-to-o...

n3rdy• 13 years ago

If someone has allodial title to their property then government cannot tax it. They can only tax property they own and rent out, which is almost all land in the U.S. that hasn't been purchased or confiscated from land owners.

If record of that allodial title is destroyed or lost, then you will have a difficult/impossible time proving you own your land.

tzs• 13 years ago

In many jurisdictions in the US, won't adverse possession make much of those old title problems moot or at least make current title fixable without having to sort out the past mess?

viraptor• 13 years ago

Without 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• 13 years 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...)

brudgers4• 13 years ago

Franklin 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.

king_jester• 13 years ago

Franklin 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.

This is absolutely the typical case. Archiving various kinds of documents is hard. Professional archivists generally have a Masters degree in Library Science or a similar field. When there are many kinds of records (paper, photo, etc) it is difficult to start the process and handle things correctly.

mcv• 13 years ago

First book burnings in Canada, now in North Carolina. I expect new witch hunts in the New World.

mattlutze6• 13 years ago

They were burned to abate an invasive mold problem, not cover up mysterious Nicolas Cage movie plots.

bdcravens• 13 years ago

As 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?

mindslight2• 13 years ago

Oh we've got plenty of those too under the CFAA.

mhurron2• 13 years 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.

jusben13692• 13 years ago

You 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• 13 years 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.

mhurron2• 13 years ago

There 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• 13 years 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.

guard-of-terra• 13 years ago

This is all fun and games to you until you are held liable for working for extra-terrestrials on account of destroying precious documents.

Which is exactly what should happen to those people.

Asparagirl3• 13 years ago

Hi, 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

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...

jspc• 13 years ago

I 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.

throwaway_yy2Di• 13 years ago

I'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-frankli...

minikites2• 13 years ago

See Asparagirl's great comments about this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7017891

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7018441

bonemachine4• 13 years ago

Smells like plausible deniability. The "mold" claim is especially dubious.

saalweachter• 13 years ago

Saying 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• 13 years ago

I 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.

160-Year-Old Documents Intentionally Destroyed in Franklin County, N.C.

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