When You Were My Age

Today's title plant is one that consists largely of bits and bytes; the county in which I spend most of my time has a computerized index of the public records that dates from 1996 forward. But not long ago, the compilation of those records was done by hand: on index cards, thousands of little tiny envelopes, punched-card sheets, or any other way the "poster" could come up with to organize hundreds of square miles of land, and the pieces of paper people used to describe them.

Ownership of real property is one of the things this country and others rely on as a basis of liberty; every thousand pages or so, when records were photographed instead of scanned digitally, a clerk might get careless and pull the camera back too far.

These are two of the hands that kept records of that real property in Ottawa County, Michigan, in 1946.