Category: Miscellaneous

First Buzzard Sighting – 2023

We were building our log archway this evening, and I thought there were a few geese coming in off the lake … but they were flying strangely (well, strangely for geese anyway). Gliding through the air, I saw five buzzards! They are really early this year (although they were also flying south … so maybe they thought better of hanging out this far north in January?).

Accessing Records – Cuyahoga County Probate Court

We went up to the County Courthouse today to view some old probate records — just like the recorders office, this is all stored seemingly forever and available to the public to review. There is a room where the microfiche is stored in cabinets.

Each drawer is full of boxes — when you search the Cuyahoga County probate court records, newer records have files in the “Docket” that you can view. Older cases don’t.

They do, however, contain a record that provides the film roll number.

And each file drawer has a list of numbers housed in the drawer — to find the film for this case, I needed to find the drawer with roll 03575

Voila — here’s the roll. Each box indicates the range of case numbers imaged onto the roll … I confirmed the case number I wanted was in that range.

They also have a film viewer computer — if you select the type of film, the screen will give you a little animated video with instructions on loading the film. Look for that in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

Bookshelf Adventure

We’ve been looking for bookshelves for a long time — both Scott and I have a lot of books, and Anya has an ever growing collection of books. We found about a dozen shelves — cantilever metal library bookshelves — and paid six dollars for them all. Basically, the shelves cost our labor and fuel to remove them from the site.

Now, that was a lot of work. We spent two days loading the truck with shelf bits — they used two 15′ box trucks to move the shelves in, but we managed to pack it all quite densely and got all of the shelves packed into the pickup truck bed in two trips. When we counted them all, there are 16 double-sided shelves and a single sided shelf.

Medina County GIS — Accessing Linked Data

There’s a lot of data that I’ve been using the old Medina County GIS system to access because I couldn’t figure out how to get it from the new Medina County GIS platform — finally got it!

The first step is to select a data layer that has linked data — this could be surveys, old tax maps, building permits, septic permits, etc.

Once a layer is selected click on the “Identify” icon — a blue circle with a letter I inside of it. I’ve been using “Draw Point” — this changes your cursor

On the map, draw your point on the icon for the data element — for tax maps, this is a gray box with some text in it. Building, septic, etc have colored shapes.

The trick, then, is to scroll down on the “Identify” tab — it’ll always start with the general parcel information (ownership, parcel size). But, if you scroll down, there will be new sections specific to the data layer you selected. Here, it’s the archived Tax Map scans. Click one of the “View” links …

Voila — you’ll have the information.