The Tazewell County clerk’s office is making it easier to find information in certain historical documents by using artificial intelligence.
A recently added AI search engine enhancement on the county clerk’s website can analyze handwritten details in digitized copies of archived county board minutes and military discharge records.
Tazewell County Clerk John Ackerman says the new technology will save time when they’re trying to find names and other details contained in the records.
“This will unlock for us a treasure trove of historical information and make it easier for staff to locate information that they’re looking to obtain from these records,” Ackerman said during a news conference Wednesday afternoon.
As an example, Ackerman showed a century-old book containing the first 10 years of “painstakingly handwritten” county board meeting minutes.
“It’s a wonderful book to have; we value it,” he said. “But it really isn’t something that we can search or look through, because you’d have to sit there and read page-by-page all the way through to be able to see where the item you might want is located.
“Now this book not only is available digitized online, but the curse of handwriting, you will be able to search it using the search engine to find the materials.”
Ackerman said it basically amounts to eliminating any need to look for “the needle in the haystack” when searching through old county documents.
“These aren’t records that were previously unavailable. They’ve always been available for public review. That is a primary function of the office of county clerk is making these historical records available to the public,” he said.
“Now this AI search engine is going to read the text for you, it’s going to locate those words, bringing it up on the screen and make that research that much more readily accessible.”
The enhancement is provided by ArcaSearch Digital Archiving Services, the company that previously handled digitization of the military discharge records in 2023, the county board meetings in 2024, and all of the Tazewell County yearbooks in 2025.
“For decades, millions of pages of our history, census records, handwritten journals and county board minutes from the 1800s have sat in silence. They weren’t hidden, but they were effectively unreadable at a scale, because human eyes simply couldn’t process them fast enough,” said Steve Fiers, document preservation consultant with ArcaSearch.
“Tasks that would take a historian a lifetime now take AI only mere hours. We are turning cryptic cursive into searchable text, allowing families to find their ancestors with a single click. We aren’t just looking at the old ink. We are giving a voice back to the people of the 19th century. This isn’t just a win for technology, it’s a massive win for our shared heritage.”
The county paid ArcaSearch a one-time service fee of close to $47,000 to add the AI enhancement, paid from modernization funds set aside last year for the clerk’s office.
Ackerman said the AI technology has been active and online for the past week, after teaching the system how to read the specific handwriting in the documents.
“My understanding is that it’s currently sitting at about a 95% accuracy rate, and that that accuracy rate will only increase as more and more users utilize the service,” he said.
Ackerman says Tazewell County is the first county in Illinois, and one of the first in the country, to incorporate AI into its office operations.
He says it will not only benefit clerk’s office employees trying to find certain records, but also individuals from all across the community.
“This is really something that’s going to allow local historians, allow local libraries, students doing research, but also citizens that just want to research their family history or research through the records,” he said.
