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PREFACE

Both the Constitutional Convention Commission of 1965-1967 and the Consti-
tutional Convention of 1967-1968 documented their deliberations and proceedings
with a view toward posterity. Records were carefully organized, arranged, and
described for permanent preservation in the Hall of Records, the archives of the
State of Maryland. The records selected for retention were those deemed essential to
a thorough understanding of the manner in which the Commission and the Conven-
tion did their work. The work of assembling the archives fell to the presiding officer
of both the Commission and the Convention, H. Vernon Eney, and to the archi-
vist/historian appointed by the Convention, Sherrod E. East. The guidelines fol-
lowed by Eney and East were, in the words of the former, to preserve the material
that would show "how and why the Convention came into being; how it was organ-
ized and how it functioned ..... /and/ how the proposed Constitution evolved."

The following Guide describes the accumulated records by series, that is, by
units of records of the same form that deal with a particular constitutional subject or
that were created to document the work of a particular committee or office.

The initial arrangement of the records was devised by Eney and East. After
Eney's death in 1980, his office files relating to the Constitutional Convention were
transferred to the Hall of Records, augmenting the materials relating to the Consti-
tutional Convention already in the custody of the archives. The entire collection was
then sorted, arranged, and inventoried, resulting in the following finding aid.

The records of the Constitutional Convention Commission and Constitutional
Convention are part of the public archives of the State of Maryland, and as with all
such records are available for use in the public search room of the Hall of Records,
Monday through Saturday.