T-L Photo/ROBERT A. DEFRANK Belmont County Recorder Mary Catherine Nixon prepares to retire after 24 years safeguarding the county records.

ST. CLAIRSVILLE – Mary Catherine Nixon is closing out her career as recorder for Belmont County this year.

Her name will not appear on the primary or general election ballots, as she did not file for re-election. She has worked in the courthouse for a total of 54 years.

“I graduated high school, I worked for about a year. I was hired by Nick Munas, who was the county recorder then,” Nixon said. “He was a World War II veteran. He had his hands blown off in the war. He had hooks.”

Nixon continued at the recorder’s office under the next recorder until his retirement.

“I said I would run (at that time). At the end of this year, I’ll be 24 years in this office as recorder,” she said. “I’ve been here 20-something years and half of the people don’t know what we did, which is good, because if I hit the news then I’m doing something wrong.”

“I was like everybody else. ‘Who knows what the recorder does?'” she said. “I like history, and of course at the time, you’re a young girl, you don’t think about the history of these things. I just love this job. I probably wouldn’t have stayed as long as I stayed if I didn’t like it. I like the people, the responsibility.”

The importance of her office is evident in any real estate transaction.

“You can’t buy a piece of property without coming into my office. If you do, you don’t know what goes on with that property. It could have 500 liens on that property. I had somebody who went down to a sale years ago, I think it was an auditor’s sale, come up after she bought it and come up and look at the mortgage. There was a $40,000 mortgage on that property, and that goes with the property. She almost fainted.”

“That’s what the attorneys do when they do a title search. They make sure everything is clean, and how do they do it? It’s because of our records,” she said.

This was particularly evident during the initial years of the natural gas and oil boom in Eastern Ohio.

“When the oil and gas hit, that’s why all those people came by. They were searching the records to make sure whoever said they owned that oil and gas, to make sure they owned it,” Nixon said. “Maybe 30 years ago their grandfather or somebody sold it off.”

She said that was among the highest in demand her office has seen.

“I had talked to other counties. They were limiting how many people there were in their office,” Nixon said.

At first, she refrained from setting limits on the number of people conducting records searches, but eventually the demand became too much.

“There was … on the floor, on hands and knees, a girl with an index book open because there was no room on the counters to put the books. I went, ‘That’s enough. I’m responsible for those books,”” she said. “We limited 30 people in here for an hour. … They were happy they were here in Belmont County. They said they’d been in other counties and we treat them better.”

During her career she has also kept up with the pace of technology, which has reduced walk-in searches.

“Our demands have changed. Technology has changed,” she said, recalling days when the grantor and grantee in a property transaction wrote their names in the records books. “That changed with the computer. Now I’m online. You can sit at home and search the records. You can go back so far, but not clear back. This county was started in 1800, and it was even before the state (of Ohio was formed). That’s going back quite a bit.”

Nixon recalled a flood caused by a burst pipe during remodeling of the courthouse in the 1970s. She said that caused the office to move off-site for several years.

WHen her retirment begins in 2021, Nixon intends to relax at her home in Bellaire.

“I just had some nice people to work with. I met a lot of nice people in Belmont County,” she said.

Democrat Cory DelGuzzo and Republican Jason Garczyk are seeking the office in this year’s elections.