DeKalb County Clerk and Recorder Tasha Sims is the key officer holder for maintaining county birth and marriage records, applying tax calculations, and is the county’s chief election officer.  She also maintains land records and is the keeper of minutes and resolutions for the county board.  Sims has a busy office handling as many as 16,000 deeds and mortgages a year, 600 marriage licenses a year (the clerk as license records going all the way back to 1837), and 500 passports a year.  This is in addition to extending taxes for 156 local taxing bodies.

 

Sims said elections are a topic of special interest these days.  She said her pledge to voters is that elections will be fair, accurate, and secure.  Part of that is the routine maintenance for elections equipment scheduled to take place before the first election next year in March.  Sims said this past election had only about a 10% voter turnout.  She said the lower turnout gave her the chance to personally visit all 40 precincts in the county to observe first-hand that elections were going smoothly.  Sims noted that updating of voter rolls is a year-round process.  She also made a pitch for election judges noting they are always in demand.  Sims said she hopes her time as County Clerk and Recorder helps restore people’s faith in the election process and County government.

The Rotary Club of Sycamore is committed to supporting many great causes. Following are the causes we have support since July 2022:

April 16, 1867 – Aviation pioneer Wilbur Wright is born in Millville, Indiana.

 

April 16, 1889 – Film legend Charlie Chaplin is born in Walworth, England

 

April 17, 1918 – American actor William Holden (The Blue Knight, Sunset Boulevard, Sabrina, The Bridge on the River Kwai) is born in O’Fallon, Illinois.

 

April 21, 1926 – Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor – Queen Elizabeth II – is born in Mayfair, London, England.

April 18, 1906 – An early morning earthquake rocks San Francisco causing the deaths of over 4,000 people and destruction of 10,000 acres of property.

 

April 19, 1775 – It was dawn and 70 armed militiamen stood face to face with a British advance guard unit on Lexington Green when an unordered shot from the British became “the shot heard round the world” and the American Revolution began.  Eight Americans died and ten were wounded in the melee that followed.

 

April 20, 1999 – Two students armed with guns and explosives carried out an attack at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killing 12 classmates and a teacher and leaving 20 people wounded before killing themselves.

 

April 22, 1970 – An estimated 20 million people turn out for locally-organized environmental educational events promoted by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson.  Nelson was trying to call attention to the inaction of Congress on environmental issues and inaugurated the first “Earth Day”.