Uncle Joe and plat books

Hey, there’s my Uncle Joe’s 80 acres in Democrat Township of Carroll County in the 1950 Carroll County Official Farm and Business Directory, published by Keyes Publishing Co., Peru, Ind.

Uncle Joe lived across the road from the farm where he and my dad and seven other Flora kids were raised. It belonged to Charles Pope in 1950.

In his day, my dad was the best farm appraiser in the county and he had a large library of plat books for Carroll and the surrounding counties. I gave several of them to Delphi attorney friend Tom Ives a few years ago, but discovered a cache of about 20 plat books in a box in our garage a week ago.

For the uninformed, plat books show each parcel of land in a county, noting the name of the owner and the acreage. Uncle Joe sold the farm and he and his wife Cassie retired to a mobile home court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Here he is with my mother when we visited him in the summer of 1970.

That was the year I learned it’s a bad idea to go to Florida in July. I also learned about sand fleas.

Among Joe and Cassie’s neighbors in their trailer, oops, mobile home park was Johnny Roventini, who was the bellhop who did the “Call for Phillip Morris” cigarette commercials on radio and TV for more than 40 years. I never got to meet him though.

Uncle Joe died in 1980 at the age of 80.

But I digress.

I just listed 17 of the plat books, which include Carroll, Cass, Clinton, Benton, Newton, White, Tippecanoe, and Howard counties, on Ebay. They’re a great source of information for genealogists.