Cayuga County Records Office

Cayuga County Records Office

Records Office from street

Address: 12 Court Street, Auburn, NY

Phone: (315) 253-1037

Website: http://www.cayugacounty.us/Departments/Records-Retention/Records-Archives

The County Records Office is tucked away on a small side street in the city of Auburn. This small non-descript building in what was once the Cayuga County Sheriff’s office, is tucked between the courthouse and Westminster Presbyterian Church. As it is downtown, parking is not free, however there are many choices nearby. On street parking is available and there is a parking lot on the other side of the street about half a block away. These are by paid by meter. On the Loop Road there is another lot that is beside the old Seward Mansion on South Street. Across the Loop Road is a municipal parking garage as well. Loop Road is a circular road that was created with urban renewal in the 1970s that circles across Genesee Street and North and South Streets near the center of downtown. If you park in one of the places on the Loop Road, you can either walk a block to Genesee Street and over to Court or cut through the parking lots of Westminster Church or the YMCA next door.

Section of The Loop Road

Hours are Monday through Friday from 9 am to 5 pm with the exception of governmental holidays.

Photocopies and printouts from the probate files are 25 cents each; those from the microfilm of deed books are 65 cents each. I was able to browse and print the probate records myself, but the clerk did the printout of the deed records on the day that I was there.

The records office contains indexes to probate records. Once you find the box number you need, you can go to a little room off the main hallway where a computer has all the probate files arranged in files by box number. Within that are listed the individual names and another quick click will bring you to a digitized version of the persons’ probate packet. You can, like most Word and pdf files, then select either just certain pages you want to print or the entire file. Unfortunately, you are not able to get a digitized version for yourself.

The deeds are on microfilm and you must know the book and page number in order to find them. Family Search has some of the indexes available and the county historian, located next door also has the indexes available for you to look them up.

On a recent trip there I was able to quickly find some probate files of ancestors that I wanted to have copies of. There was one particular deed that I was interested in. Since childhood I had heard my father tell the story of how on April 1, 1923 when he was 4 years old, his parents had bought a farm and moved from their rented farm about a half-mile away. He remembered his excitement and arriving at the nearly empty house with his mother and running in circles around the large, square living room. The same living room that we were often sitting in as he told me the story. I was able to get a copy of the deed where my grandparents had bought that property on April 2, 1923- just a day off from his memory. 

The living room in later years