Licking County Records & Archives Blog

One of our probate records which gives insights into the daily lives of early Licking County residents is the Estate Inventory Record of the years 1815-1824.  When a property owner died without a will, his belongings were listed in an inventory by persons who were assigned as appraisers by a court.  The 1856 edition of Bouvier's Law Dictionary describes this sort of inventory as: "A list, schedule, or enumeration in writing, containing, article by article, the goods and chattels, rights and credits, and, in some cases, the lands and tenements, of a person or persons.  In its most common acceptation, an inventory is a conservatory act, which is made to ascertain the situation of an intestate's estate, the estate of an insolvent, and the like, for the purpose of securing it to those entitled to it." Because of the "article by article" nature of these inventories, you can get some fascinating information about the possessions of a person from the pas...

If you are tracking a person who was a registered nurse or other type of non-physician practitioner, two volumes in our collection might be valuable.  The earlier volume is Certificates of Registered Nurses and Limited Practitioners.   It covers the years 1916-1948, and is limited to persons who lived and/or practiced in Licking County.  The non-nurse "limited practitioners" described in it include chiropractors, optometrists, osteopaths, chiropodists, electrotherapists, hydrotherapists, massage therapists and psychotherapists.  Also included are practitioners in areas which are not widely considered to be legitimate today, such as magnetic healers and mechanotherapists. The later volume, from 1948-56, is entitled Registered Nurses Certificates .  It does not list non-nurse practitioners. The records of registered nurses in both volumes indicate the names of the nurses, the nursing schools from which they graduate...

For records keepers, there is more to preserving hard copies of important office records than just finding a convenient storage place.  Its important to be prepared in case a disaster such as a flood, fire or tornado occurs.  Paper or microfilm records can also be seriously damaged by more minor events, or by regular storage conditions which are problematic.  Excessive heat, humidity, or exposure to insects or mold can cause great damage over a long period of time.  In Ohio, county government offices have had to deal with a variety of problems that threatened their records:  in Summit County, burst water pipes soaked several boxes of files.  Montgomery County experienced an outbreak of mold which seriously endangered records there.  In Stark County, a roof collapsed during a major rainstorm, and a foot of water covered the floor where some Board of Elections records were located. Documents damaged by insects H...

In the 19th and early-20th centuries, many Licking Countians supported the Temperance Movement, which sought to lessen the consumption of alcoholic beverages.  Temperance advocates believed that the drinking of alcohol significantly contributed to vice and other social problems.  Other county residents opposed the movement.  Some depended for their livelihood on businesses such as The American Bottle Company, which produced beer bottles, or on the operation of saloons.  Conflicts over the issue led to climactic events in 1910, when a detective who was investigating illegal alcohol sales was lynched in Newark.  Carl Etherington was a young detective who was investigating speakeasies in Newark.  He shot a man in self-defense who later died.  Etherington was imprisoned in the Licking County Jail and later lynched.  Jail Register pages such as this one contain information on Licking County prisoners.   Do you have any p...

An index to persons' names in two early Licking County court dockets is now available.  This index lists all names from the Common Pleas Trial Docket of 1814-1823, and the Supreme Court (Ohio) Docket/Licking County of 1814-1825.  Most of the names found in the dockets are of persons who were plaintiffs or defendants in court cases during these periods.  Because records are relatively sparse from the first few decades of Licking County, this index might be very valuable for tracking down people who lived here during those years. Much of the handwriting in these dockets is very hard to read, so the spelling of some of the names is based on guesswork, and sometimes verified by searches in the 1820 and 1830 census records.  The docket index lists the person's name, year when he was in court, page number on which the name appears, and notes by the indexer about possible variant spellings, deceased status, etc.  The dockets themselves are pu...

Volunteer Bob Grove Bob Grove began volunteering with us in December 2012.  Since then he has helped with several tasks such as cataloging archival materials, scanning Jail Register  volumes, preparing document collections for scanning and helping with box pickups and deliveries.  Bob is a native of Newark, Ohio.  He graduated from Newark Catholic High School and Denison University.  He is currently employed as an Imaging and File Clerk with the Licking County Prosecutor's Office. Jesse Grove on the far right, with staff in the Licking County Courthouse (undated, ca. 1925) Bob also donated pictures to us of his grandfather Jesse Grove.  Jesse Grove was Licking County Auditor from 1923-31, and Mayor of Newark from 1936-40.  He was a mailman before he was elected Auditor, and he farmed along Flint Ridge Road after his term as Mayor.  If you have any old pictures of people in Licking County Government which you would allow us to copy o...

Licking County Records & Archives, at 39 S. Buena Vista St. There were several very significant developments in the Records & Archives Department last year: Imaging Technician Corinne Johnson and Senior Imaging Technician Angie Spray scanned a total of 305,427 Clerk of Courts and Probate images.  Angie, Corinne and Records Manager Katy Klettlinger have also been involved with the implementation of OnBase, which is an electronic document management system.  They consulted with the Juvenile and Probate Court Divisions to see how OnBase would be useful in those offices.  Angie and Corinne are now both certified OnBase System Administrators.  According to Angie, OnBase " will help departments locate and retrieve documents more easily.  It also has workflow capabilities that allow you to have a document--let’s say a purchase order--which needs to be seen by multiple people.  You can send that document to everyone that it ...