Historic Floyd County property records now available online

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

A huge number of records kept by the Floyd County Recorder’s Office and the Auditor’s Office are now available for online viewing, free of charge.

County Recorder Amy Assink demonstrated the system during the county’s 170th anniversary open house held recently in the courthouse.

Thousands of pages of recorded documents were scanned, indexed and are now available on the internet through a project paid for with a portion of the federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) COVID relief funds that the county received.

Besides providing easy public access to the documents, it also provides another level of backup to the documents in case some catastrophe befalls the originals at the courthouse, Assink said.

The scanned records are on a website maintained by the company that did the scanning, Cott Systems. The address is recordhub.cottsystems.com.

Persons using the site are required to set up an account, but even though the site refers to fees and subscriptions, once a viewer gets to the Floyd County records the subscription fee cost is listed as $0.00, and the number of searches, document viewing, downloads and time spent searching are all listed as unlimited.

The records were scanned from originals in books stored at the courthouse.

Assink said the project is basically land records recorded before July 1, 1987.

“You can now search historical records dated from 1854 to approximately 1987 anytime and from anywhere with an internet connection,” she said.

Recorder’s Office property-related documents after that date are available on the Iowa County Recorder’s Association website called Iowa Land Records.

The old documents scanned for the Recorder’s Office include deeds, surveys, miscellaneous documents and records of affidavits, along with their indexes.

Assink said she didn’t have old mortgage records scanned, because almost all of them that were filed before 1987 would have been released by now, “and the cost was well over $100,000 to scan the mortgages.”

Auditor’s Office documents scanned were property lists and platted and unplatted land documents.

The county’s contract with Cott Systems of Columbus, Ohio, included scanning more than 250 books from the Recorder’s Office. The contract for the Auditor’s Office included scanning 42 loose-leaf books and nine bound volumes.

The scanning project was approved by the county Board of Supervisors in late 2022, using more than $220,000 in ARPA money, from the $3.1 million the county received. There is an additional charge of $265 a month for the company to host the electronic records and make the databases searchable and available online.

“Banks, attorneys, Realtors, abstractors, they can access these older documents,” Assink said. “And the indexing was scanned also, so they can look through the indexing … and it will take you to the book and page and you can find that historical document.”

Assink said the county also paid to have Social Security numbers redacted from older documents that contained them, so those documents could be made available online.

“I also did have military discharges scanned, but those are for our use, in-office use,” she said.

Beside making the records easily accessible to the public, the scanning provides another measure of backup.

“The benefit of this, too, is to preserve those documents,” Assink said. There are copies on microfilm stored offsite, but even in a climate-controlled environment microfilm doesn’t last forever.

With the additional electronic backup, “if there was a natural disaster and something happened to our books, we would still have records of them,” she said.