Just take those old records off the shelf / I’ll sit and digitize them by myself / There’s just not as much room today / To store our records the same ol’ way.

Put the tune of Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll” to the lyrics, and county Historian Dr. Michael Eula could really sell the idea to a toe-tapping beat.

As it was, Eula had no such accompaniment during his recent presentation to the county’s Human Services Committee. But then again, he had no problem with his request to save the county money. Eula wants to apply for a grant to get his department’s record-digitizing project off the ground — and into the clouds, so to speak.

The project would take old paper records and transform them into digital format at the History Department and Records Center in County Building 2.

“We need to get those records off the shelf,” he said. “Not only to get them digitized but to increase shelf space. If we can get more than $75,000, that would be great, $75,000 is not a whole lot of money, but it’s a movement in the right direction to get these records digitized.”

Not those kinds of records, the long players and 45s of Seger's era, but paper records of history — census reports of births, deaths, who owned slaves, church minutes from the early 1800s, genealogy collections, marriages, divorces, military records, maps and school documents. Just imagine your ancestors’ heritage not being duly protected for posterity — that’s a topic worth paying attention to.

The goal of the department has been to ensure that records are properly administered and available to local government officials, citizens, and researchers. And Eula’s efforts will also save some taxpayer money, he said.

Many records have to be kept for at least 50 years, and some are to be kept permanently, he said. He has found a way to do it while saving the county money, retaining the necessary resources to help, and applying for the grant himself without a costly consultant fee.

“I’m asking for permission to apply for a $75,000 grant with the local government records management improvement fund … basically, it boils down to this: I want to see digitized our long-standing records in terms of what the retention schedule requires, 50 years to permanent, I'd like to be able to get those off the shelf, get those digitized, in particular, to not only save shelf space but also to allow people to access files that they need from their desk,” Eula said. “That would go a long way to cutting down a lot of the foot traffic that comes in and out of the Records Center. So I'm hoping this grant application will be successful. And before we proceed with it, I want to obviously get permission from this county to write the application. Once those records are digitized, they can be destroyed while the digital versions are stored in a master file in the Cloud.”

There are “giant volumes” of payroll records that date back to the 1980s, and people ask for them all the time, he said, related to pension purposes. Imagine if he or his part-time clerk didn’t have to thumb through stacks of paper to retrieve that data and could instead do a search on computer.

“It would make that whole process easier,” he said.

The county uses services from Biel’s of Rochester for electronic document management, with a big chunk of the grant money earmarked toward that service. Not only is it about space savings, and more efficiency, he said, but there are other departments located on the other side of town — Social Services, for example — and staff would have to drive over to West Main Street Road, search for documents, and drive back to the office. Once everything is online, it would just require some keywords and a click to retrieve that same material without leaving one’s desk. That's time and money saved, plus a big convenience right there.

What would it cost to completely digitize everything?
“We’re looking at somewhere between $200,000 and $250,000,” he said.

Although he did not get this grant the first time he applied, or perhaps because of that, he feels more confident this time around, he said. He has a better sense of what the granting entities are looking for and plans to check in with other municipalities that have received the grant to obtain tips for what to include in this next application. A company quoted him upwards of $10,000 to write the grant, but Eula would rather save taxpayers that money and do it himself, risking no extra expense.

“It’s a very competitive grant, very bureaucratic,” he said. “You have to know key phrases. They’re not very forthcoming in telling you why you were turned down.”

The deadline for applying is March 2024, so he’s getting a jump start on the process, but he also knows how quickly time goes by, so he’s aiming to be done by the end of the year.

“I am confident this time around,” Eula said. “There’s no guarantee. I do think now, having some time now, this one stands a good chance of being successful.”

Dr. Michael Eula, Genesee County historian, at the History Department in County Building 2 in Batavia. Photo by Howard Owens.

Eula, the Genesee County historian since 2014, said on Monday that “catching up from the closure” of the county’s History Department for more than two months due to the coronavirus will be his biggest challenge heading into 2021.

The office, located at County Building II on West Main Street Road, closed on April 22 and reopened in late June.

“The furlough seriously impacted the productivity of the department on both the records (management) side and the history side,” Eula said during a report given to the Genesee County Legislature’s Human Services Committee at the Old County Courthouse.  

While the department was able to meet all of its information requests, primarily through email and telephone, the number of volunteer hours “declined dramatically this year,” he said. “All in all, we did as well as we could expect.”

Actually, the county research library assisted about 300 people interested in local history, Eula said, generating about $980 in revenue in 2020. He also reported that volunteers donated about 470 hours, despite the interruption in service.

“These volunteers contribute enormously to the work of the History Department, which only has two full-time members (Eula, who doubles as the Records Management officer, and Judy Stiles, research assistant) and one part-time member who works in the Records Center,” Eula reported. “In conjunction with the full-time staff, volunteers assist with the indexing of records, the filing of historical documents, and the processing and storage of those primary historical documents.”

Eula said the department made 19 presentations (some via Zoom) on local history and conducted tours and responded to 279 information requests. He spoke on local history on four occasions to a total of 450 attendees, again utilizing Zoom technology.

As far as the Records Center is concerned, Eula said 181 cubic feet of obsolete records were removed and shredded, while 392 cubic feet of inactive records from county departments were transferred.

The Records Management program responded to 143 requests for records, and the Microfilm Lab produced 41 rolls of film for county departments, he reported.  Still, shelf space is not a problem, he said, as the department has four to five years of available shelf space.

Eula, who has a Ph.D., also has written a piece for the New York State Bar Association, Flexible Tradition: The History of the Courts in Genesee County, New York."

He is an honors graduate of Rutgers University, California State University, University of California and the Regent University School of Law. Along with more than 11 years of military service, he served as an administrative law judge in Riverside County, Calif., for 13 years. He is a Professor Emeritus of History at El Camino College in California.

At the end of May, the Genesee County History Department received a collection of $10,000 worth of Emory Upton documents from a donor from Georgia.

Michael Eula, Ph.D., the county historian, said the donation is a type that is usually received by large university libraries.

“We have a number of his papers here already,” Eula said. “These are all originals.”

Salvatore Cilella, of Atlanta, donated the documents.

The collection consist of 28 documents dating between 1862 and 1892. These include special orders, military passes and letters to friends and family.

Also included is a Western Union telegram from 1864. Upton wrote to his brother, Parley, about the wound he suffered at the Battle of Winchester.

Eula said there is no plan for the Upton documents to be put on display at this time.

“This is the sort of thing that UB would get,” Eula said. “I am proud to say that we have it here.”

Eula said Upton is one of Genesee County’s most famous people.

According to a history compiled by Eula, Upton was born on Aug. 27, 1839 on a farm near what is now in Batavia. He was the 10th child born to Electra and Daniel Upton.

Upton attended Oberlin College, transferring to the U.S. Military Academy, graduating shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, in 1861.

Being in his mid-20s, Upton rose to the rank of Major General by the end of the war.

“He had displayed his bravery and leadership skills at such noteworthy Civil War battles as Spotsylvania and Fredericksburg,” Eula wrote.

In 1868, Emily Martin married Upton in Auburn. She died from tuberculosis a little more than two years later in 1870.

After the Civil War, Upton became an educator and policy maker through his tenure as Commandant of Cadets at West Point and through his research and writing.

Upton published “A New System of Infantry Tactics” in 1867. His other famous work, “The Military Policy of the United States,” was published in 1904. It analyzed American military practices and examined the nation’s military history.

“Upton was more than a West Point graduate and a Civil War hero,” Eula wrote. “He was more than an accomplished scholar who met a sad end. He was instead a clear product of his historical moment.”

In 1881, Upton committed suicide while serving as the Commanding Officer of the 4th U.S. Artillery at the Presidio in San Francisco.

“Why had he taken his own life?” Eula wrote. “For some, it was believed that he never fully came to term with Emily’s passing. For others, it was the result of severe headaches which had become so overwhelming that the only recourse was this ultimate physical escape.”