PULASKI CITIZEN JAN 25, 2005 HISTORIAN'S LABOR OF LOVE ENDS AFTER 18 YEARS ON THE JOB CITIZEN of the week By Sheila Holden Lifestyles Editor In the previous 18 years, Elizabeth White has lived in the past and the present at the same time. At least, that is how the Citizen of the Week described the years she spent reading through transcripts of Giles County Chancery Court proceedings and other old records found in offices of the courthouse. "Sometimes it was confusing because sometimes I got to believing some of the people were still around," White said, laughing at herself. "They just become real to you. You read the court cases and see how they live and where they lived, and it is real somehow." White has retired from the Old Records Department located on the top floor of the Giles County Courthouse. Her last day was Thursday of last week, and she has left her longtime friend, Clara Parker, to carry on the work they started in February 1986. However, White didn't leave the job before helping to create a fabric of Giles County history from which generations to come will benefit. "I know of no one who has done more to preserve the records of Giles County than Elizabeth Witt White," said Frank Tate, a longtime friend and fellow genealogist. "When Elizabeth saw on the third floor of the Pulaske Courthouse the jumble of Giles County Records, she decided something needed to be done. "Her decision evolved into what we know now as the Old Records Department, which was named by her." Even before there was the Old Records Department, White was there at the courthouse researching family roots. That's how she met Parker, when the two would meet at the courthouse to go through the old records. After meeting Eulala Weldon in Limestone County, Ala., at the Old Records Department housed in a former post office building, White and Parker knew what they had to do to Giles County. They talked with then County Executive Earl (Corky) Wakefield. "We finally got up the courage to broach the subject, but nobody knew what we were talking about," White said. Without compensation in the beginning, White, along with Parker, spent several summers, with help from participants in the former Summer Youth Program, cleaning the third floor of the courthouse as well as the old record books taken from the various courthouse, offices down below. "There were some who didn't understand what we were doing," White said, who is noted for her outspokeness, "but thank goodness for the County Court at that time." What the ladies did was to clean all the old record books, dating from the early 1800s to the early 1900s, with a special solution, placing them on the third floor in an effort to catalog and preserve them. The Giles County Old Records Department that they created is at least one of the first such archives in the state to have been set up in a rural county. In the ensuing 18 years, White and Parker have continued cleaning and preserving the records as well as reading and cataloging them. The ladies remove all the paper clips, staples and the brass tabs that have been attached to the old papers, giving them a more preserved atmosphere, and all have microfilmed and placed in archives in Nashville. "We haven't had the most pleasant place to work," White said, "and we'd have to sit there even on the hot days." From 8 a.m. to 4p.m. every day the ladies would be in their "nest" in the top of the courthouse reading, cataloging, cleaning the records and answering requests. White said they never received a request they couldn't find. In a related story in an upcoming edition of the newspaper, find out about the Japanese man who found his mother, the lady looking for her mother after 40 years and a daughter looking for her father. From those many hours of reading and taking notes came books which are now copyrighted and placed in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. "An outstanding work done by Elizabeth is six volumes of the Chancery Court Records 1830-1900 found in the many Woodruff Metal Boxes in the chancery court office at the courthouse," Tate said. "These indexed volumes reveal much of the history of Giles County and are a delight for historians as well as family researchers." Also, for three of the 18 years, White and Parker trudged through the backwoods of Giles County looking for long forgotten vine-covered, overgrown cemeteries in the winter and walking through the more clean ones in the summer. "(Elizabeth) and Jackson White, her husband, spear-headed the cataloging of the cemeteries of Giles County into book form which became 'Cemetery Records of Giles County, Tennessee.'" Tate said. "This volume is used by countless people searching for their ancestors and others needing a vital statistic." Genealogists, historians and those interested in researching various historical facts and figures have visited with the ladies on the third floor. Parker said, "Elizabeth has been wonderful to Giles County in sharing her knowledge of the history and also helping to preserve the written history - it being the abstracting of thousands of loose papers put in book form for researchers from all over the U.S." White's retirement is being lamented as a huge loss to the county. "She's been a wonderful asset to this generation and every generation to come," said CITIZEN-FREE PRESS staff writer Claudia Johnson, who has visited the Old Records Department, especially within the last year. She's provided a valuable service to Giles County, agreed Mark Dunavant, who was president pro tem of the County Court 18 years ago. He was instrumental in getting county funds set aside to create the Old Records Department and to place White and Parker in charge. "She has helped to preserve the history of this county," he said about White, adding that because of what both ladies have done, the Old Records Department will be more meaningful in the future. In the fight to preserve it, White has probably forgotten more about Giles County history than many of us will ever know. But, she said, there's more than 18 years of work left to be done. "We haven't done much pass 1900," she noted. The work has been painstaking and it has been dirty, and done for many years without pay. "I wouldn't take anything for doing this," she said, "I was not paid a whole lot, and Clara and I certaintly couldn't have lived on what we made, but it's been a lobor of love for Giles County." White would not have missed the years she climbed the steps to the third floor of the Giles County Courthouse. "I've been climbing those steps for 18 years, and I'm tires," White quipped. Her retirement plans included living with her daughter. She'll miss Parker and Dan Watson "a lot," people in the offices, the research, etc., but being "cooped" up in the nest of the third floor of the courthouse isn't what the Citizen of the Week wants to do for the rest of her days. "I want to look at the sky. I want to sit in the sun and look at the flowers and the butterflies this summer and enjoy the beauty of nature in Giles County. "I can't leave Giles County. I was born here and I'm like ol' Burr Rabbit - I'm stuck. "I'll live here for the rest of my days." Editor's note: More of Elizabeth White's memories of the past 18 years will appear in an upcoming edition of the newspaper.