Young retires after 29 years of service as Davison County Register of Deeds

Feb. 29—MITCHELL — A familiar face at the Davison County Register of Deeds office is stepping down from her position.

Deb Young, who has served as the register of deeds for the county since 1995, retired on Thursday, bringing an end to decades of public service that saw her serve thousands of members of the public handling public documents of all kinds, from wedding licenses to land transfers.

"Today is it," Young told the Mitchell Republic. "I'm 63 and I'm going to make that old enough (to retire). I've been here for 29 years and two months."

Young, who was born in Burke and is a University of South Dakota graduate, first ran for public office in 1994 after having worked at a law firm for 13 years. During that first run for office, she estimates she knocked on thousands of doors in Davison County introducing herself to her future constituents.

It was a lot of work, but after winning that first election for the seat she would occupy for nearly three decades, she said she was fortunate to have limited competition for the position.

"I ran in 1994 and knocked on 3,500 doors to get the job. Knocking on doors and telling people who I was," Young said. "You have to run every four years and have to take a petition out, and as luck had it I've never had competition. You still have to take out petitions and get your signatures, but other than that I haven't. That has been really nice."

The lack of opponents challenging her may speak to the level of approval voters had for her and her work. Young worked long hours helping modernize the register of deeds office, moving it out of the paper era and into the computer age. Countless documents had to be moved from physical form into a digital format.

That work didn't just stop at the Davison County office. Young worked with colleagues in other register of deeds offices to help pass legislation that helped other counties make their own transition during that time.

Part of that included securing funding from the state legislature so that no county would be left behind when it came to being able to afford the transition process.

"We were all paper when I started, and I brought it into the digital age and worked on legislation and we created a modernization and preservation fund so that all counties would have enough money to do that," Young said. "We worked on a lot of legislation and I also found that interesting. It was scary but it was interesting and always a win when you got it through. It was like you won the ballgame."

Young acknowledges that the actual transferring of records to a digital format was a considerable task, but she said the office rented machinery that made the process easier. Today, digital records in county and state offices are the rule rather than the exception.

But the equipment couldn't do the work by itself. Young put in many hours at her desk outside official work hours, when she could work in relative quiet compared to the buzzy, busy office that saw many members of the public walk through the doors on a daily basis.

"It was a lot of work, but we had good machinery that we rented, because you didn't have to have it forever, but it was a lot of work," Young said. "I worked a lot of nights and weekends. I worked a lot of holidays, too, because it was quiet."

She works better when it's quiet, but it wasn't quiet in the break room of the Davison County Courthouse on Thursday morning, where a reception for her was being held. Friends and coworkers gathered to reminisce, offer hugs and congratulations and to wish her well in the next phase of her life.

The Davison County Commission is expected to appoint one of her deputies at the office to take over her old duties, she said.

Young isn't exactly sure what that next phase will entail, but she plans to stay active, which make sense for someone who has also worked off and on over the years in many professional organizations as well as local groups like the YWCA, the United Way, the March of Dimes and the Mitchell Skating and Hockey Association.

The register of deeds who started out greeting thousands of voters door-to-door and earned a reputation for hard work both during office hours and beyond also said she may look for another job where she can work from home, perhaps assisting other register of deeds offices with tasks she can do without coming into an office.

She said she will miss her time at the office and her coworkers, but for now it's time for a break.

"Right now I'm kind of ready for some downtime," Young said.