Sad News for Green County History
It makes my stomach turn to have to write this, but the vast majority of Green County’s criminal court case files have disappeared: they are not in the archives held at the Southwest Wisconsin Room at the University of Wisconsin- Platteville campus, where they are supposed to be.
I found out this information at the same time that UW did. I had planned a visit to the campus and the day before my trip I received a distressed email from their archivist. The archivist explained that in trying to prepare for my visit, he’d discovered that a crucial portion of the collection wasn’t there: all the criminal case files.
I went to the archives none the less, and together we had a closer look at what remained. A few criminal case files were still in the collection, a handful from the 1860s and the odd one or two from the following eighty-some years. The archivist was as distraught as I was; this is the type of thing that makes historians nauseous.
What makes this situation doubly troubling is that the collection was organized according to case number, so criminal cases were interspersed among civil cases, civil cases making the vast majority of the collection. To lose the criminal cases only someone would have to go through the archive, box by box, pulling out criminal case files. A hugely time consuming task and not something that would happen accidentally.
It appears that the most likely time frame for the loss was the 2008-2011 period, during preparations for the transfer to the the new Justice Center. The office of the Clerk of Courts was not able to give me much information, including the dates covered in the archive that they gave to UW, and they were under the impression that no index of the archive existed. The UW-Platteville campus checked their intake paperwork and were able to tell me that the collection was received in 2011. When they accepted the collection, they were told they were getting the complete archive, criminal cases included.
There was a period when the archive was in ‘limbo’ and searching for a home. Local historians remember that the case files were held at Ekum Abstract and Title for a period; this was confirmed by an Ekum representative. Unfortunately, any materials pertaining to the archive that Ekum stored were disposed of long ago and the company says nothing is now left.
A contemporary index to the Green County archive was created and is held at the UW-Platteville campus. It is possible to see the names of the individuals involved in criminal court cases in our county, but details of the cases were held in the files.
I really hope that the explanation for this situation lies in something like a half-completed reorganization of the criminal case files, a project that was abandoned and forgotten, so that somewhere the missing files are sitting in boxes waiting to be reunited with the archive. If this is the case, I am on hand to drive them to Platteville myself. Since the separation event took place a decade ago, I’m hoping against hope.
When something like this happens our community suffers. These records weren’t just the history of the defendants or the lawyers representing State of Wisconsin, they were records of events that affected the entire community. That’s why the State of Wisconsin got involved. When important records are lost or destroyed, we loose our chance to learn from them. Green County has suffered a loss that shouldn’t happen in an open society.
I want to thank the Southwest Wisconsin Room archivists, the local Green County historians and everyone else who helped me piece together what happened to the records, as far as I have been able. A lot of people care.
