There is a secret historical treasure trove hidden in plain sight in the heart of Hollister. Few people even know it exists. It contains valuable documents dating back more than 100 years and Angela Curro is the gatekeeper whose mission it is to guarantee none of the treasure will be lost to neglect or abandonment.
Curro’s official title is Assistant County Clerk/Recorder/Registrar of Voters, and the secret treasure is located in the San Benito Counter Recorder building, sort of. Actually, the treasure trove is behind that building in an early 20th Century building with an engraved sign, “Hall of Records,” which can only be seen through a window in the recorder building. From outside, in the parking lot behind the recorder’s building, there is no indication of the significance of the old building.
Inside, Curro gave a glimpse of what she has been up to for the last five years as she pointed to a wall of books.
“All of these books are either deeds or official records and we’re in the process of doing a complete inventorying every inch of this building, every piece of paper, every file, which has never been done,” she said. “We’re about 80 percent done.”
As Curro and her staff go through the volumes of books and files lining every wall and in various nooks and crannies, she said the goal is to determine exactly what each item is and the years they were created.
“We’re pretty much through the books and we getting into the ugly things, which happened to be historically incredible,” she said. “When Joe Paul (Gonzalez, County Clerk, Auditor & Recorder) first brought me in here I said this is the coolest room ever. This (elevated tunnel between the two buildings) wasn’t here. It was the grand entrance to the Hall of Records.”
She motioned to an ornate winding staircase going up to a second floor that was blocked by an old microfilm reader.
“We blocked it to keep the public from going up there because it hasn’t been inventoried yet and I don’t want any of these records going away,” she said and then motioned to a wall of white and black books, “These are all old (supervisor) board meeting minutes, but also one of the reasons they’re here is because the official statement of votes and all the records of elections are inside these books. They taped them inside these books, so I don’t have statement of votes unless I have these books. So, we’re going to restore them digitally and then share them so that he (Louie Valdez, clerk of the Board of Supervisors) has what he needs for public access and I have what I need if somebody needs to access the records and we do it for them through the Clerk of the Board’s office.”
Other records, Curro said, were court decrees that were not transferred to the new courthouse. She is trying to determine if they will be given to the San Benito County Historical Society or stay where they are. There are also some very old mortgages that because they are official records are being restored through a restoration company.
“We have indexes that tell us who has purchased or sold property so you can see the chain of title,” Curro said. “We don’t actually create the chain of title. It is something that title companies go through and create it based on past history, or the assessor’s office also has some historical information about the chain of title because they maintain the last recording document that changed ownership of the property. Between the two of us we can create who owned every property since the beginning of time.”
In fact, there are handwritten documents with hand-drawn maps indicating Spanish land grants in at least one book, and there is an entire wall of such books that are called patents, which are not the patents that inventors file in Washington, but records of purchases made from the United States.
“When you buy from the United States of America before it’s bought by another person you have a deed buying it from the United States of America,” Curro said. “These records go back to 1850.”
Curro said each book was a laboriously re-transcribed from Monterey and Fresno recorders’ office records before San Benito County was formed in 1874. Each contains records pertaining to property titles in what was then part of Monterey County. She compared two books, one prior to restoration and one that had been restored.
“We, as the recorder’s office, are mandated to maintain the books indefinitely for historical preservation purposes,” she said. “We’re required to collect a dollar on each recording or two dollars, depending on what we’re doing to the books, for restoration and modernization.”
Curro compared two books side-by-side, “Take an old book like this and you modernize it like this, which gives you a more readable book, but it also de-acidifies the book, so each page goes through a chemical process that brings the ink back out and stops the aging process of the paper. Then they’re encapsulated (in plastic) in one of these sheets and each one is imaged, they’re microfilmed and digitized.”
Even though records today are stored digitally, there is still a need to film historical and official documents.
“You use film in case of a natural disaster or even a nuclear incident,” Curro said. “These are in underground vaults. They used to be in Tahoe and they’ve been relocated to Sacramento. All of our records from the county recorder’s office are inside these vaults and there is limited access to them. Only people with credentials like mine, with authorizations from Joe Paul, can actually go and see the records. That’s part of our restoration and disaster recovery plan.”
Should there be an earthquake or other disaster that brought down the building, every current record has been backed up and is located in the Sacramento vault and could be viewed or reproduced.
“There wouldn’t be any fights over who owns what,” Curro said.
The staff annually records and scans approximately 58,000 official records, excluding 42,000 annual vital records, birth, death and marriage, which are kept at a different location because they are not accessible to the public. Curro said there are no new books in the building because the books represent “old technology.” The new technology, she said, involves scanning and imaging documents immediately, then the original is returned to the person who brought it in.
“We don’t retain any original documents any longer,” Curro said. “Then, twice a month, all those images are sent to our microfilm company that puts them on reels of film and those go to the vaults in Sacramento. We have multiple backups of the digital images, but then we have two sets of film, one here and one in Sacramento.”
Prior to the 1970, the last of the paper documents were filmed in a negative image and now when they are restored the image has to be reversed to a positive.
No one would be able to readily find land title information if not for index books. All are handwritten and enable title companies to find properties by seller or buyer, going in reverse, all the way back to when the property was first purchased or even granted by Spain.
“It’s free access, but one of the big concerns we have is that this is not a fire-suppression building, there’s no accessibility to it and there’s no security when the books are being reviewed,” Curro said. “We log-in visitors, but we don’t really have any control over what happens while they’re in here. I have not encountered any vandalism, but I have heard that people will come in and tear their deeds out of the book. The good news everything is filmed, but we really don’t like the fact that we don’t have security.”
Curro began the restoration in 2013, and the goal is to restore 375 volumes. So far, 58 have been restored, which includes 40 years of records. Each book is taken apart, page by page, in hermetically-sealed rooms. Each page is cleaned, de-acidified, microfilmed, and inserted in plastic sheets. The covers, many of which are beyond repair, are reproduced in a fire-resistant case that looks like the original covers. Each book costs $2,000, and so far the total restoration has cost $123,000.
“Because we do it in volume we get a better rate,” Curro said of the cost per book. “I do everything to the books. I don’t leave anything out. You could just rebind them or re-film them or not acidify them. We do everything and these books will last 300 years at a minimum. This is an investment for our children and the future and will be available for anybody to see all the way back to the patents when the land was owned by the Spanish and how it the U.S. and then the first buyer.”
One book she showed Benitolink dated back to 1844.
“This is what we’ve been dealing with in trying to restore,” she said of the handwriting and hand-drawn maps indicating the land belonged to Rancho Ausaymas and Rancho Balsa de San Felipe, dated 1870.
She said when examining the breadth and depth of the records there are some gaps because various administrations weren’t consistent in the way they recorded documents.
“Nobody took snapshots of those administrations,” she said, “and what I’ve been working on for five years is documenting the snapshots of what happened in each of those years so people can have an easier way of finding things because back in the early days there we six departments under one official and all the staffs did all the work. So if you were at a board meeting and someone happens to be buying a piece of property and the board agrees to sell it, they just wrote it in the board minutes. They didn’t look for the most current land book and record it because it was easier to just put it in the minutes.”
Curro said that is why some of the records are hers and some are the responsibility of the clerk of the county Board of Supervisors.
“The goal is to restore those so he (Valdez) has them and they (supervisors) can go into the Laserfiche (new software) and he can access them and we have our own imaging, retrieval and indexing system that allow you (the public) to go in a look up a name and all the documents connected to it,” she said.
When Curro first got the job, a friend in San Mateo County who held a similar position told her she would fall in love with the books and would never want to let them go.
“She was right,” Curro said, “because once you start to know the history you just can’t let it go.”
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