NORWICH – Chenango County Clerk Mary C. Weidman has announced the completion of a project that digitized historical indexes and related real property record books for Internet access through the office’s existing website.

Two hundred forty-eight mortgage books and 400 deed books with over 507,160 records have been digitized and added to the search capacity on-line and within the clerk’s office at the Chenango County Office Building in Norwich.

Funds for converting historic files were made available through a competitive grant from the Local Government Records Management Information Fund.

The project involved the scanning of deed index books back to 1920 and mortgage index books back to 1950. In addition, the record books were also scanned and provide images of the deeds and mortgages from 1950 to present. The county clerk’s existing computer vendor, Cott Systems, incorporated the images into a unique software module developed specifically to replicate the Lusk and Graves key table retrieval logic utilized by the old index books.