Leavenworth County Kansas Research Review

Have any of you ever gone to a courthouse to research and find that the staff are less than knowledgeable or are really no help at all?  That is what I encountered when I was researching Probates and Wills at the Leavenworth County Kansas courthouse.  I arrived at the customer service window and informed the person sitting behind the very thick glass window that I was there to research some records.  I told her what records I was going to be looking at and she seemed completely lost as to what it was that I was there to research.  So I again informed her only to be told that the person that normally does that is not there and that she did not know anything about those records and could not help me.  So I explained to her that I had several years experience and asked her if I could look at them since I knew exactly what I was looking for.  She showed me to some books where she again told me she did not know anything about them.  Well Luckily I knew exactly what I was looking at as soon as I saw the large bound ledgers of information staring me in the face. 

It is always disappointing to go to counties where the employees are completely untrained and uninterested in learning about the old county records that they get to spend hours a day with.  I guess it’s just a job to them.  Which is too bad because they get to do something I would love to be doing on a daily basis.  Of course If I were a county administrator those employees would be spending their days when not assisting customers, indexing those records to get them online.  County governments across the country are missing out on a financial windfall with the old records just sitting around their courthouses and employees who are too lazy or unwilling or are uninformed to make a suggestion to get those records online to increase county budgets. 

Have you ever encountered a county employee unwilling to assist you or was completely oblivious to the records in their courthouse?