Immediately after the flood, the documents were taken to be freeze-dried and restored.
They’re due back soon, said Cherilyn Lamson, town clerk.
“We have hopes to be back in business next week,’’ said Lamson.
Moretown was one of a number of communities in Vermont and New York where municipal and county records were damaged and possibly destroyed by floodwaters that inundated the Northeast in late August and early September.
In New York, where flooding devastated areas in the eastern half of the state from the lower Hudson Valley to the Adirondacks, one archivist called the damage “massive.’’
“This dwarfs anything we’ve done,’’ said Geof Huth, director of government record services for the New York State Archives in Albany.
Huth’s office advises local governments on how to manage their records and how to recover them when disaster strikes.
About 100 local governments sustained flood damage to official records, he estimates.
While the real estate records have clear and immediate use, the historical documents have other value.
Vermont is one of three states where local records are required to be kept at the municipal level, said state archivist Gregory Sanford. In many cases, land records date back to the when the towns were laid out in the mid-1700s.
Municipalities are also required to keep vital records such as birth, death, and marriage certificates, minutes of public meetings, tax and planning documents, and, in some cases, school registers, said Trevor Lewis, a records analyst with the state archives.
They are required to be kept in vaults that are fireproof, but there is no requirement that they be waterproof.
“There are the core legal requirements, but there are also other records of historical interest and historical oddities that have ended up being deposited with the clerk,’’ said Sanford. If those documents are lost, “what you begin to lose is the evolution and the personality of a town. It almost becomes a form of institutional amnesia.’’
