One-stop shopping
This Saturday, March 26th, The Legal Genealogist is getting together with a whole bunch of Maryland genealogists at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore for the Pratt Annual Genealogy Lecture — four lectures, in all, focusing on genealogy and the law.
To be precise, these lectures: That First Trip to the Courthouse; Finding the Law; Making a Federal Case Out of It; and The Ethical Genealogist.
So, of course, in preparation for these, I had to spend some time poking around in old Maryland statutes, and anyone who regularly does Maryland research knows what I found.
One-stop shopping.
I mean, seriously, the Archives of Maryland Online couldn’t make it much easier to do research into Maryland laws starting as far back as the Freemen’s Assembly of 1637/38 and as far forward as the Session Laws of 2014.
Both in word searchable text format and in digitized volumes of early records — often records microfilmed by the Library of Congress — the site has compiled about as comprehensive an online library of state law as exists anywhere in the United States.
And it’s all readily available for any of us to work with, even at 3 a.m. as we sit at our computers in our bunny slippers.
We can read, for example, of the trial of Thomas Smith, “indicted of pyracie,” before that Freemen’s Assembly on the 14th of March 1637, and how he was sentenced to death and to forfeiture of all his property, saving only that his wife retained her right of dower.1
We can read of the imposition of an export tax in October 1695 on “furrs or skinns” in order to pay for “the maintenance of a ffree schoole or schools within the Province” — with the rates set at:
every Bear Skin nine pence sterling
Beaver four pence p skin
Otter three pence p skin
wild Catts, foxes, Minks ffishers and Wolf skins one peny half peny p skin
Muskratt four pence p Dozen
Racoons three farthings p skin
Elk skins twelve pence, p skin
Dear Skinns drest or undrest four pence p skin
young Bear and Cubb Skinns two pence p Skin…2
We can read how, in 1752, the Legislature changed the law so that no slaves could be set free by will or testament “inasmuch as giving Freedom to Slaves, by any last Will and Testament, may be attended with many Evils.”3
And how the Legislature acted in April 1777 to encourage service in the military forces of the Revolution, by exempting anyone who enlisted from arrest for debt and exempting his property from execution while he served.4 Those 1777 laws had both carrot and stick: anyone who helped any deserter could be fined, imprisoned or, for a second offense, whipped.5
And it goes on and on… through private laws like the 1805 “Act for the relief of James Gantt, an insolvent debtor, of Prince-George’s county”6 and public laws like the one in 1861 authorizing the Baltimore authorities to close the bars and taverns “whenever in their judgment the public peace and tranquillity may require.”7
Wonderful resources, full of both direct genealogical information and the laws that let us understand the records we find.
Check ’em out.
SOURCES
- Archives of Maryland 1: 16-17, Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly January 1637/8-September 1664, in Archives of Maryland Online (http://www.msa.md.gov/ : accessed 23 Mar 2016). ↩
- Ibid., Archives of Maryland 19: 276, Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly 1693-1697. ↩
- Ibid., Archives of Maryland 50: 76, Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly 1752-1754. ↩
- Ibid., Archives of Maryland 203: 154, Hanson’s Laws of Maryland 1763-1784. ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- Ibid., Archives of Maryland 562: 2, Session Laws, 1804. ↩
- Ibid., Archives of Maryland 526: 38, Session Laws, 1861. ↩
Thanks, Judy. Your timing for this post couldn’t be better for me. I just started searching for my husband’s Dean and Ellett ancestors in Maryland yesterday; his 3rd ggrandparents and their oldest daughter were born in Maryland and migrated to Indiana between 1810 and 1815. I was just looking at the Enoch Pratt Free Library website and a few others yesterday, but hadn’t come across the Archives Online yet. Hooray!
Glad this hit the spot for you!
This is great for Maryland’s laws. Some of my wife’s ancestors came through Maryland.
What about the statues of other states? Is there a general answer for the type of websites to search for the state statutes? The state archives? The state attorney general? The state historical society? The state genealogical society? Is there one site that links to all 50 states?
Then within the website, how do you narrow down the law in effect at a particular time period? If you want to know what law was in effect in, say, 1828, the year 1828 won’t help except in the rare case that a law was passed on that subject in 1828.
Ernie Thode
It sure would be nice if there was one-stop shopping for all the early state statutes, but the only place that has them all is the subscription site HeinOnline and its Sessions Laws library — and 24 hours will cost you $25. Other than that, it’s a state-by-state, case-by-case situation as to whether all of the session laws are online at all. As for narrowing it down to a particular law, I teach a whole course on that topic… because there are multiple methods of getting to the right law for the right time. Not something that can be readily answered here.