Transcript:
Dauphin County has two hundred and sixty-eight thousand residents and we are a very diverse county. We are an administrative office in the courthouse. We deal with the register of will side, which is the probate of estates.
We are the ones to appoint the executor or administrator of an estate, and then the clerk of the orphans’ court side is responsible for issuing marriage licenses, and we are the record-keeping office for all filings orphans’ court-related. We had a lot of records that were unscanned, that were old, that were crumbling, that were from the eighteen hundreds up until the early nineteen sixties that had not yet been scanned and digitized.
We made an effort to go through the process of having each and every one of them scanned. And that was over three million documents. And chunk by chunk, little by little, we were able to have them all scanned and preserved digitally so that they are now all available online through the GovOS system, and it has been a wonderful resource, not only to residents of Dauphin County, but anybody who is looking for genealogical information throughout the country or even people that are calling from another country that are American citizens that want to get some information on an estate or on any historical record that we have in our office. It’s been a major time savings for us, and the added bonus is that they are preserved.
It was always our goal to convert all of our records from paper to digital, to have another backup, to be able to search it quickly, and to put that information out there for the public to use without needing to come to the courthouse. And that process was sped up because the county decided that our physical space could be smaller to accommodate a different department. And all of the record books that we had, very large books, heavy to carry and to pull off shelves and look down, we scan, index, image, all of that information.
So now every record going back to the late seventeen hundreds before Dauphin County even fully existed is scanned and searchable using the GovOS Record system.
There are many things that I’m proud of in this office. The initiatives that we’ve done from back scanning our marriage licenses, our inheritance taxes, all of our register of wills and estates, and even all of our orphans’ court matters. Everything has been scanned and digitized and is now available to the public. The next would be our virtual systems, both eMarriage licenses, eProbate, and our eFiling.
That has certainly saved people interacting with our office, time, it has saved them money. And in the end, it has made us much more efficient and customer service friendly.
