Love May Be Fleeting, but the Document Is Not

Thomas Gillette was sorry.

So sorry that he apologized to his wife in a typed two-page letter, walked into the McHenry County recorder of deeds office and made his regret a part of history.

“You have been, and continue to be, a good, faithful loving wife, with dreams that [are] my dreams, loves that are my loves, passions that are my passions,” Gillette wrote. “You are the love of my life, and I will continue to be faithful to you in all aspects of my life.”

The marriage ended last spring -- two months after he recorded the apology.

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Every county in Illinois has an elected recorder who will immortalize nearly any document for about $40. The great majority of files are land records, but a small fraction are people recording pieces of themselves.

Sprinkled among the millions of documents are bits of love, fear, apology, inventions, conspiracy theories, political manifestos and the inexplicably odd.

Whether the documents take on any legal weight is questionable, but that doesn’t seem to deter people.

“I think maybe those people just want to be a part of history,” said Lake County Recorder Mary Ellen Vanderventer.

Recorders are unsure how their relatively obscure government office became the people’s museum. Some homeowners might come across it while filing mortgages, but more often it is the domain of lawyers and mortgage companies.

“A lot of people don’t know what we do and it’s not like we’re out there advertising,” said Will County Recorder Laurie McPhillips.

Documents are numbered and stamped with the recorder’s name and precise time they transcended being mere scraps of paper. Most files are kept as scanned documents, on microfilm or, in the case of the items stretching back to the 1800s, in large hard-bound books filled with browning pages.

Larger counties like Cook and Lake get more than 1,000 new items a day while smaller counties, where recorders often double as county clerks, average 10 to 100. None are immune from unique or personal recordings.

In tiny Johnson County at the southern end of the state, a man recorded a piece of paper on which he wrote in green crayon, “This is the color of green.”

In Lake County a man recorded a handwritten scrap that says, for no obvious reason, that he is “Native American Indian, Cherokee/Blackfoot Tribe’s” and “in law inforcement [sic] for over 11 yrs.”

In Washington County, a woman recorded a hazy photo of her dead husband, circling the holes where she believed government officials had extracted fluid from his body.

“We’re here to serve the public regardless of what their wishes may be,” said Washington County Recorder Tom Ganz, who chuckled at the thought of the photo. “They’re the ones who put us in office.”

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Among the most popular alternative uses for a recorder’s office has been trying to validate political and philosophical leanings, a check of the records shows.

Renouncing U.S. citizenship with homemade memos titled “Exodus Documents” is particularly popular. In 1993, Olga Boor recorded hers in Lake County, saying in an eight-page document filled with references to God and Jesus Christ that she was pledging allegiance to the “Illinois republic.”

From a cellphone in an RV in “the middle of the desert,” Boor said she couldn’t remember exactly why she recorded her exodus documents. She did so with a bunch of like-minded people to vent their disgust with the federal government and the fact that “corporations run the country.”

Even with her document notarized, it is unlikely to take on any legal significance, according to Vanderventer, the Lake County recorder. But that doesn’t stop many people from trying to validate their agendas.

“Sometimes they just want that document to seem a little more official than it actually is,” Vanderventer said.

Recorders’ offices have also become a popular place to preserve ideas and inventions -- such as Richard Tylkowski’s “Litter Licker Sticker Picker.”

Tylkowski, of Fox Lake, recorded his idea after a 5 1/2-year stretch in federal prison, where he’d been picking up trash with a single nail on a stick when he realized that a lot of nails could pick up a lot more trash.

When he got out in 1997, Tylkowski, now 78, stopped by the Lake County recorder’s office to immortalize the “Litter Licker Sticker Picker” with a crude two-page drawing that includes minute details of how to build the contraption.

“I was afraid if someone saw it and tried to make it later I’d be knocked out of the ballpark on the patent,” he said. “Now, it’s mine and I can prove it. But I really dropped the ball by forgetting all about it.”

All sorts of creations sit in recorders’ offices. In 1973, as the war in Vietnam was winding down, a Will County man recorded lyrics and sheet music for a song called “Our Country.”

In Rock Island County, a woman recorded designs for what she called a pouch towel -- two towels sewn together, leaving a space in between to hold a bar of soap. In McHenry County, two men recorded their plans for a ball-joint driver, a tool, as its name implies, to drive ball joints into cars.

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And of course, a few people have used recorders’ offices to make their love eternal.

Wanting to reaffirm their wedding vows for the millennium, George Martin, a retired Lake County sheriff’s deputy, drafted a one-page document that he titled “Recommitment of Marriage.”

On Feb. 14, 2000, he and wife Salli stood before a judge and signed the paper.

That afternoon, Salli, who has worked as a part-time proofreader for the Lake County recorder’s office for eight years, recorded the document on a lark after processing so many bland legal documents.

If those could live forever, she figured, why couldn’t her love?

“Maybe if we lived a long time ago we’d have had it etched in stone, but this was as close as we could get,” Salli Martin said.

“We’ll be dead and gone and this paper will still be here,” she said.

So will Gillette’s letter, in which he apologizes to ex-wife Maureen Murphy for “words said in anger or words meant to hurt,” which included threats to take her inheritance and longtime home.

“For an instant I thought he might be serious, but in the context of the rest of his behavior, it didn’t mean a lot,” said Murphy, who no longer has a copy. “But I guess he was trying to make it official.”