Whuuummmmmmm goes the sound of the oversized scanner taking an image of old real estate records stored at the Arapahoe County administrative building. A worker patiently waits to flip the next page of a giant book more than 100 years old. After scanning it, he checks to see if the image was clean and in focus.
Check. Flip. Whuuummmmmmm. Repeat.
Day in, day out for three weeks in September 2021, employees from US Imaging camped out at the county records office in Littleton and worked around the clock to digitize analog land records and marriage licenses dating to 1861.
It took a few more years using software to improve the images, but last week, county officials announced the job was finally done. Some 6.5 million images and pages and 3.5 million recorded documents had been scanned and checked for legibility.
The data is still being indexed, but pretty soon, anyone will be able to go online to search for a historic record, like the one from 1867, when President Andrew Johnson issued a land warrant granting 160 acres of the county to the heirs of “Simon Kilmer musician,” a War of 1812 veteran.
There’s also the county’s first marriage license, issued to George M. Benedict, who may or may not be a former Littleton mayor. The earliest marriage certificates are handwritten in cursive so uniform they look like a computer font. One can view Benedict’s original 1903 marriage record to Miss Ella L. Rockwell of Denver in person — but by appointment only.
“These records are now digitally stored,” county Clerk and Recorder Joan Lopez said during a ceremony to mark the occasion. “They will be safe from damage and preserved for future generations. And they will be easier for the public to access more than ever and forever.”
Arapahoe, which became Colorado’s first county in 1861 (15 years before the state became a state), is one of the last counties to get its analog land records online as part of a statewide funding effort that started after the legislature passed Senate Bill 115 in 2016.
The law created the Electronic Recording Technology Board, or ERTB. County clerks began charging an extra $2 per document to fund the board, which brings in about $3 million a year. In turn, the board gives grants to counties to modernize their systems. So far, more than $21 million has been awarded in 57 counties.
“We are almost done with the entire state,” said Michelle Batey, ERTB’s executive director. “We probably have less than a handful of counties that need to finish. We’ll probably be the first state in the nation to do that.”
In 2002, Colorado became one of the first states to require counties to record documents electronically, essentially ditching analog and creating an e-record of mostly real estate documents and tax liens. Counties were allowed to add a $1 technology surcharge.
But converting records from before 2002? That was up to the county to find funding.
“Most counties just don’t have enough funds to be able to do that,” she said. “Obviously recording documents isn’t the sexiest thing to spend a line item on so it was always prioritized last.”
Rural priorities
When the board was created in 2016, larger counties like Denver, El Paso and Jefferson were collecting between $55,000 to $155,000 a year in those $1 fees.
Smaller rural counties collected as little as $500, according to a legislative note at the time. That’s barely enough to pay for a computer or software, and far from the amount needed to convert bound books, photostat pages and reels of microfilm to a fully digital system, Batey said. The ERTB prioritizes small rural counties.
Without the grants, Kit Carson County (population 7,007) certainly couldn’t afford to digitize its real estate records history, said Susan Corliss, the county’s clerk and recorder since 2015.
Grants totaling about $400,000 helped the county get the job done. They hired US Imaging, which had employees work 24/7 for about a week to scan 62,689 handwritten records, and index another 176,729 typed documents, Corliss said. Under state law, records books aren’t allowed to leave the clerk’s custody, so the county had to manage 24-hour security for the building in Burlington that week.
“They were here 24 hours a day,” she said. “I don’t even know if we could calculate how many years (for staff to do it) because you’re still doing your normal work.”
Kit Carson County was 100% digitized by 2021.
“We were already online (and) had updated software so our records at that point were up to 1994,” she said. “But now everything through 1889 is online.”
Denver started its process of converting analog records in 2013 without any state funding. By 2019, the city had digitized 11 million documents, including marriage certificates, city ordinances and property records like plats, deeds, liens and foreclosures dating to 1859.
There’s more to be done and the city has received just one ERTB grant of $200,000 in 2019. Document fees do offset some of the cost but digitization is expensive. The Denver office usually relies on the city’s general fund, which is shrinking. A $1.1 million project to digitize 10 million records is only partially funded, said Ben Warwick, a spokesperson for the Denver Clerk and Recorder.
“As the custodian of many of the city’s historic documents, we have a project that started in October 2023 to digitize about 700+ boxes of physical records, which we believe to be about 10 million records,” Warwick said in an email. “Our office has put additional funds toward it as we are able, but we won’t likely be able to complete the project and make these documents available until the city’s budget situation improves.”
Only land records are eligible for ERTB funding. Marriage licenses, county commissioner meeting minutes and other records are up to the county to fund.
About $920,000 of Arapahoe County’s $1.2 million digitization project came from the ERTB, with the remaining $280,000 approved by county commissioners, said Juan Guzman, deputy director of records, who oversaw the project.
That extra bit of county funding allowed US Imaging to scan nearly 200,000 marriage licenses dating back to 1902 for Arapahoe County
Booms, busts and the record room
Head over to the Arapahoe County clerk’s office and you can take a number to get a driver’s license, passport, marriage certificate or file a land record. Some of those things you can now do online.
But when customers need records that aren’t fully online yet or they just want to view the original documents in person, they must make an appointment for the records room in the administration building.
Need to use the microfilm reader? Staff must set up the machine, which requires loading up a small reel of film similar to those at a movie theater.
LEFT: Juan Guzman, Arapahoe County’s Deputy Director of Records, opens a drawer filled with microfilm reels that contain the records of real estate information recorded at the County Clerk’s office. RIGHT: A reel of microfilm from 1888. It was part of a mid-century effort to preserve original records. (Tamara Chuang, The Colorado Sun)
Staff must be in the room for customers who need access to the old books. And some of those folks spend hours searching for records, requesting one book after another be pulled from the shelves.
“It used to take a lot of our frontline staff from doing all of the other work because they had to basically sit there and watch people look at books,” Karl Herrmann, Arapahoe County’s deputy clerk and recorder, said during the celebration.
Guzman, who oversaw the project, said he never saw anyone rip a page out of an original bound book or pocket a roll of microfilm. But his staff has. He’s never pressed charges.
Books are often damaged due to age and use. And sometimes lunch.
“They would flip through page by page,” Guzman said of researchers. “And depending if they just came back from lunch, their hands may have oils on them or different things. So they’re putting their fingers on the pages. And when you do that for 20 to 30 years, that page is going to degrade. And then they cough in their hand, if anything, it’s on the pages and that spreads to other pages in the book.”
The little records room gets busier or slower depending on the economy. One staffer recalled a booming era when oil and gas employees would have to wait in line to use the microfilm machines.
“We had so many searchers come in and we only had a certain amount of room. And we only had two microfilm machines,” she said. “Some of those searchers, you know, time is money for them so they did not play well with each other.”
Only one microfilm reader still works. The other one is scavenged for hard-to-find parts.
The booms and busts of the real estate market also impact activity in the records room. Investors need to know where the property lot lines are.
“Our volumes went down this year because people were staying in their homes longer,” Guzman said.“It’s like what’s on the horizon in the next five years? Are we in an interest rate environment that’s on its way down like we are now? That usually triggers more activity, more people, more people buying houses, more people needing to pull the land records. … That dictates the staffing more than anything else.”
The newly digitized records, scanned in at 300 dpi, will need some additional clean up. Still on the to-do list is to examine all the records and see what might be missing. They won’t know that until everything’s been properly indexed. The county may apply for another ERTB grant since the program was extended last year to 2029.
“What really prompted this project was that it was a race against the clock,” Guzman said. “We’re trying to keep what we have.”