Our museum recently received a donation of over 700 property abstract titles and numerous city and county property maps. Since property owners today no longer receive abstracts when their mortgage is paid off, many may not be familiar with them. An abstract is a chain of title to a particular piece of property and all of them begin with the purchase of the property from the federal government, in the case of Williamson County real estate, most were originally purchased between 1830 and 1860 or later. Each and every owner in the chain of ownership including mortgage holders are contained within the abstract up to the current owner or in this case, whenever the abstract records quit being kept.

Abstracts are a genealogical and historical gold mine, since they contain all of the details of each property transaction throughout the decades of ownership. Paperwork often found within an abstract will contain but not be limited to divorce, mortgage, foreclosure, insolvency, mental health, wills and probate records, partitions and much more.

The document collection was obtained from John K. Miller by Jim Powless over 25 years ago and was recently donated to the museum by his widow, Susan Powless, thanks to Jim’s brother, David Powless. John K. Miller was the son of Ray Miller and both of them operated the Marion Abstract Company located in the basement of the Bank of Marion for decades.

The items were sorted and carefully re-boxed for storage on Saturday, June the 13^th , by Colleen Norman and Sam Lattuca.  At some point in the future, the abstracts will be indexed and itemized in a database. Since the museum is already woefully short of volunteers, it isn’t likely that the collection will be available for access at any time in the near future since we are already overloaded with projects and too few volunteers.