Records Room Road Trips: June 2024

My previous Circuit Court Records Preservation Program (CCRP) Road Trip post covered locality travel for May, so this is June’s travelogue. Back in late April as I was planning ahead for Northern Virginia overnights, I had an epiphany. Visiting the city of Alexandria and Arlington County would not involve any records transfers nor delivering or retrieving any other items, and my overnight bag would not be unwieldy, so I checked the train schedules and Metro schedules. At the time, the cost of a refundable round trip train ticket to Alexandria was remarkably cheap (prices went up in May). I booked the train tickets quickly, made hotel arrangements near the train & Metro station in Alexandria such that I could walk to the Alexandria Circuit Court one day, then take the Metro over to the Arlington Circuit Court the next morning, then take a late train home to Richmond. No traveling on I-95 necessary!

Examining historic records in the Alexandria Circuit Court records room can sometimes be challenging, since the jurisdiction of this area often changed.¹ In previous visits I had focused on examining late-18th and early-19th-century deed books that had been taken apart for microfilming decades ago, with loose pages of volumes housed in acid-free oversized boxes and stacked on shelves. These often reference or include the District of Columbia and Alexandria County.² After meeting with Clerk J. Greg Parks and touring the various areas where records are housed, I continued with these deed books on this visit and also examined a sample of early marriage licenses. Even though my main mission is always to examine the condition of an item, when examining volumes that contain detailed indexes, I always spend a few moments perusing them to see what kinds of activities are recorded.

Deed Book E 1803, which records activities of the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, Alexandria County, contained index entries for George Washington Parke Custis to “Negro Louisa,” indexed under “C” for Custis and “L” for Louisa. I suspected this was a manumission, but the entry itself piqued my interest. It stated that on March 1, 1803, Custis was emancipating “Louisa a child about two years old the daughter of Judith one of the slaves in the Dower of the late Mrs. Martha Washington.” I confess I am not well-versed in the history of the Washington family’s enslaved workers, so perhaps someone has already researched what became of two-year-old Louisa, or of her enslaved mother, Judith. Louisa’s deed of emancipation is extant and has been made available digitally through Virginia Untold.

It’s also fun to find hand-drawn and colored plats hidden within the pages of a seemingly standard text-based volume. Deed Book G 1803 contained a heavily torn, taped, and worn hand-painted “Plan of Alexandria in the Territory of Columbia State of Virginia” as well as a Photostat print likely made from the microfilmed version of the book. If you look closely at the print vs. the original, you can see that the original has suffered further damage in the years since it was microfilmed. While the plat should remain with the volume to be conserved, which will involve mending, deacidification and encapsulation, and placing pages in archival polyester sleeves bound in a sturdy post-binder, the plat itself will warrant extra attention for tape and adhesive residue removal, and more detailed mending, with high-quality color digital facsimiles to be provided.

The next day I checked the status of the Metro times on the Metro website and took the Blue Line from King Street/Old Town, transferring at Rosslyn onto the Silver Line to the Court House stop, right near the Arlington County Circuit Court. I met first with Deputy Clerk and Land Records Supervisor Nancy Van Doren, who also arranged for me to meet with Probate Records Supervisor Christina Dietrich and Brianne Kaufholz. Between the three areas, I was able to examine over fifteen volumes as potential future item conservation grant candidates.

In the civil division, there were a few volumes of marriage registers that I was asked to examine as potential item conservation grant candidates. Marriage Register 1879-1909 had a loose spine with tightly sewn text block, with some detached leaves and some clear tape frequently used at the gutters to reinforce sewing. In the probate division, there were a few indexes to wills that had seen their fair share of use over the decades. Many pages were torn, chipped on the edges, and otherwise surface-soiled. If selected for treatment, these will likely be disbound, with tape removed and pages surface-cleaned and mended, then encapsulated in Mylar sleeves and post-bound.

Like many localities, Arlington County has an abundance of black-and-white state highway plat books dating from the 1950s to the 1970s. For a variety of reasons, these typically are not item conservation grant candidates if a locality has other record books and/or record types that need conservation also. However, as can be seen from the photos, these plat books have been well-worn and frequently used. In future grant cycles, some of these volumes may be in the queue for potential conservation.

In addition to locality visits this month, my fellow CCRP consulting archivist colleague Eddie Woodward and I paid a visit to the Central Rappahannock Heritage Center in Fredericksburg on behalf of the clerks from Caroline, King George, Spotsylvania, and Stafford counties, all of whom have some of their historic court records stored there. Also present were Caroline County Circuit Court Clerk Susan Minarchi and CRHC Director Florence Barnick. Collections Manager John Reifenburgand, Database Specialist Diane Ballman gave us a comprehensive tour of the facility, answering any questions we might have, and eagerly showing us a variety of records.

Housed in the converted gymnasium of the old 1920 Matthew Fontaine Maury School building, we were impressed with how well-processed and organized the records were. On our arrival, I gave the CRHC staff a brief overview of the CCRP program, explaining how we assist the circuit court clerks with the preservation of their records and how this might benefit the court records stored there. This was an important introduction, as our underlying mission was to identify any circuit court records that might be good candidates for CCRP item conservation grants, and with this we were successful. The bulk of the volumes were from Caroline County, and we were able to easily identify 20 that were cellulose acetate laminated and 37 that were stripped with tape. While there, we took photos and wrote condition reports for six volumes.

As regular readers of these CCRP Records Road Trips and readers of the CCRP Newsletter may know, the removal of cellulose acetate lamination on historic volumes is an ongoing endeavor. While photographing examples of record types and condition, it is always interesting to find personal touches within them, such as the certification/affidavit in this Caroline County Marriage Register 1787-1863. These original documents had to be signed by the person attesting to the information, so one can often also discern whether a person can write. In this 1858 document, neither the bride nor her father could provide their signatures. Another individual also stated that the couple to be married were both free persons.

Minute books are also items that are often targeted for item conservation, as they often are the first draft of most interactions at a courthouse on a given day, entered in real time.

While photographing a few pages of cellulose acetate laminated Caroline County Minute Book 1787-1791, the entry for a court of Oyer and Terminer (a called court typically for the purpose of prosecuting enslaved people) was documented.³ In this situation, “Tom a Negroe man Slave the property of William Durrett charged with feloniously Breaking & entering the Dwelling House of Rachael Brown and Stealing therout Sundrie Goods of the Value of five Pounds.” The resulting verdict: “…he is Guilty of the Offence for which he is charged and that between the Hours of One & two of the clock of the 14th day of May he be carried to the Gallows and there hung by the neck until he is Dead…”

My last locality visit for June was to the records room of King George County, where I met recently elected Circuit Court Clerk Jessica Mattingly. The previous longtime clerk, Vic Mason, had participated in the CCRP grants program for years, therefore many of the volumes that had needed attention in the records room have been conserved. There are also several of the locality’s oldest volumes housed at the Library of Virginia that are cellulose acetate laminated or silked and would still be good candidates for item conservation through the CCRP grants program. The purpose of this visit was to meet Ms. Mattingly and to discuss the grant application process with her, as well to as familiarize her with the items housed at the Library that seemed to be in most need of conservation. Jessica also informed me that they are preparing to move into a new facility in the future and she had specific records management questions (which were targeted to our records analysts) as well as questions about other historical record groups. Thus, my visit was relatively brief. However, since the county’s records date to 1720, examining some of its oldest records proved interesting.

In many localities, early estate inventories regularly included enslaved people and indentured servants, along with monetary values associated with them. Shown on page 21 of King George County Inventories 1721-1744 are the listings for four enslaved people (Mingo, Jenny, Simon, and Will), and three servants (Agnes Boughanah, Alexander Casson, and David Carney). The handwriting is difficult to decipher, and it is helpful to read through the text to find instances of the letter “J” and the letter “C.” Shown on page 304 are listings for six enslaved people (Edinborough, Sam, London, Kate, Dinah, and Truelove), and one servant woman (Isabella Gorden).

This volume of King George County Wills No.2, 1780-1804 (below) was conserved in 1936 using the conservation technique of silking, an expensive lamination process which involved cutting the leaves apart and adding a transparent layer of thin fabric before adding the laminate. These often were beautifully bound with leather embossed spines, wooden covers and quality marbled pastedowns and endsheets, as was this one, conserved by the Barrow shop. Although considered cutting-edge technology at the time, it was replaced by cellulose acetate lamination, both of which are now known to have long-term detrimental effects.

A King George County Court Order Book 1786-1792 (above) has several conservation concerns: warped, red-rotted, detached cover, detached, chipped, or torn leaves, some of which were mended with now-sticky and yellowing tape.

And once again, this sums up my CCRP locality visits for June. Later, July proved to be a busy travel month for me, so there will be much more to come!