92 PREROGATIVE COURT RECORDS

volumes of wills were transcribed in full. In 1912, the Land Office
purchased a Photostat camera and adopted the policy of withdrawing
from circulation original volumes which had begun to deteriorate
and replacing them with bound photostat copies. A number of
volumes were so treated. But since 1935 when the records were
transferred to the Hall of Records, it has been possible to send
the original itself to a well-equipped repair department for such
treatment as is deemed necessary. Ordinarily, the whole volume is
repaired and rebound. A list of the volumes repaired is published
in the annual reports of the Archivist.

In the course of all this repair and rebinding, the original ar-
rangement of the records has been considerably disrupted. More-
over the system used for identifying the individual libers has also
been changed, partly because many of the libers had lost their
identity by being combined with other libers. Before the present
system of numbered series was adopted, letters of the alphabet,
numbers and initials of the commissaries general or of the registers
had all been used at various times to identify the libers. In the
lists below the old liber will be given immediately after the present
liber number. The original liber numbers or letters are still found
on the flyleaves or elsewhere in many of the volumes. Otherwise
they have been determined by referring to lists of the records made
in 1673,⁴³ 1687,⁴⁴ 1699⁴⁵ and 1776⁴⁸ and to the report of the com-
mittee of 1728. The lists below will also indicate the existence of
handwritten or photostat copies, except in the case of the Proprie-
tary Records which have already been fully analyzed in the "Calen-
dar of State Archives" published in Volume I of the Archives of
Maryland. Unless a definite statement is made to the contrary,
the volume listed is the original.

PROPRIETARY RECORDS

Proprietary Records is an artificial title which is ordinarily used
to identify the earliest records of the colony. They are general
record books covering all sorts of proceedings of the provincial
government, especially records of the Provincial Court. None of

⁴³ Arch. Md., XV, 26.

⁴⁴ Testamentary Proceedings 13, 477.
⁴⁵ Ibid., 18, flyleaf.

⁴⁶ Arch. Md., XI, 113.