I went records diving at the county recorder's office this morning, going through the scanned images that haven't been indexed, just one big pile of documents ordered sequentially as recorded. Working backwards in time was going okay until about 1915, prior to which everything was handwritten instead of typed. My eyes are going to die in my skull. I could browse close to 2500 pages/hour with the typed records but only about 500 pages/hour with the hand written ones with a lot more eye strain. I'm back to 1905 now and I think I'll find what I need before I get back to 1897. Back then, the county recorder had to hand write each record. Based on the handwriting, in appears that most recorders only lasted a year or so.