Pictured are Laura Bradley and Judith Malinzak. Photo provided.
Clermont County was established on December 6, 1800, as a part of the Northwest Territory, and there have been wills, estates, and guardianships settled by the courts since that early beginning of the county.
Originally, probate matters were under the jurisdiction of the Court of Common Pleas, and Probate Court was established in 1852. Court Journals and Minutes from those proceedings give a genealogist some idea of what transpired after an ancestor’s death. However, the packets and papers from the day-to-day settlement and administration of probate matters – deeds and mortgage payments, vendue lists of to whom items from the estate were sold, copies of wills, and accounts of guardians’ expenses for their charges hold a treasure trove of names and relationships.
Those original papers, dating back as far as the late 18th century, have been in storage for the past fifty years. The Clermont County Genealogical Society’s Archivist, Judith Malinzak, has led a team over the past two years to organize those papers and to prepare them for digitization.
Clermont County Probate Court signed an agreement with FamilySearch who contracted with Ancestry to capture the images from the 73 boxes of probate case files. Laura Bradley, a local historian and genealogist, began digitization for Ancestry on March 6. Ancestry estimates it will take several months to complete the digitization. Once the digitization has been completed, it will take at least a year for the images to be published online. The collection will then be available on both Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org.
These records give us more information about the historic families who lived in our county, and we are so fortunate they will now be digitally preserved and shared.