Sunday, March 15, 2009

End of the book? NOT.....

I was SO excited when I saw the next page on my Lunatic Inquest Book Microfilm:


The next page looked like this:


And so the next page looked like this:


So I sneaked a peak at the next few pages and this section of the book has 11 pages, then there's another END OF BOOK page, then 97 more pages. Right before the 97 pages was an index section with only one page, with one entry, readable. After the 97 pages is a section that says they rescanned the index to make it readable, so maybe there will be some data there, however, there are MANY pages after the 97 and rescanned index which are NOT Insanity Records. Those pages seem to be MANY pages of Leases from Lyon County Kentucky. Many are EXTREMELY hard to read, if at all, so I probably won't transcribe those, but I want everyone interested in Lyon County Genealogy to know that they're there, because those records could be of great interest to anyone looking at the history of a particular building, or with the names on the leases, someone could tell if their ancestor was actually in the county at the time. I'll decide what I'm going to do with those when I get to that section.

So, it looks like our Insanity Records are divided into three sections:
1887 - 1910 Pages 2-224 [All those have now been transcribed on this blog.]
1910-1917 Pages 1-11
1911-1918 Pages 1-97 [In this book, the forms are different than the previous forms.]
All these records were "bound in book" and had "no available general index".

I also plan to put together an index of all these names after transcription of the entire book is finished.

There has been some discussion on other blogs as to what should be published and what shouldn't. These are public records and I hope anyone reading these has learned from them that people with certain conditions were found to be insane and that times have changed in the treatment of many illnesses, including insanity. In some ways, our society has NOT progressed. There is STILL a social stigma to mental illness, when in fact, it should be treated like any other illness. Why in the world should someone be "ashamed" of a relative with one kind of illness, which is due to nothing that person has done to cause it, than a person with any other kind of illness? The latest records in this series, on this blog, will be from 1918. If the person was old enough to be committed in 1918, then there should be no records of any living individuals in any of those records. I LOVE finding information on my ancestors. I hope all of my readers feel the same.

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