ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

nition because they assumed the major responsibility for this task, drawing on reserves of
tolerance as well as skill.

Sally Mason toiled profitably for long hours in the Maryland Historical Society, checking
private papers relating to legislators. Kay Smith Jordan worked on the biographies of those men
who served in the pre-1715 period. Louise Townsend, Lynn Bohmer, Marianne Braun, Diana
Tyson, Maxine Keller, Dawn Donaldson, Winona Wright, Sarah Davis, Lillian Bayly Marks, Mr.
and Mrs. C. R. Hutchins, William S. Hemsley, and Thomas Hunter McLean all deserve our
thanks for their contributions. Finally, the staff of the Hall of Records supported the project with
their unstinting cooperation and their accustomed professional acumen. In particular, we would
like to thank Phebe Jacobsen, whose extensive work with Maryland records and singular interest
in the project made her an invaluable asset; Frank White, an expert in the history of Maryland law,
officeholding, and politics; Patricia Vanorny, an authority on local records and director of the
archives' county records project; and Susan Nettles, who understands the machinations through
which an entail could be cleared from the tide to a tract of land in the colonial period.

The bulk of the records required to write the biographies of the men who governed Maryland
from 1635 through 1789 are located at the Hall of Records, although other repositories were
searched for relevant materials. Since our travel funds were limited we occasionally intruded upon
vacation itineraries, suggesting stops at archives or historical societies. When a senior staff
archivist accompanied her husband to Philadelphia, where he was to participate in a champion-
ship tennis tournament, we persuaded her that visiting the City Bureau of Archives and History
and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania would be more absorbing than watching her husband
attempt to vanquish his cross-court foe. On another occasion, a staff member's sister made a trip
from her upstate New York home to Kentucky, and we prevailed upon her to spend a diverting day
or so at the Kentucky Division of Archives and Records, locating probate materials on Maryland
legislators.

The holdings of the Maryland State Library and the Maryland Historical Society were
frequently consulted. The collections at the Virginia State Library, Archives Division, the
Virginia Historical Society, and the Research Department of the Colonial Williamsburg Founda-
tion were rich in reference materials on men who served in the Maryland General Assembly prior
to 1715. Other information was secured from the Library of Congress, the Milton S. Eisenhower
Library of The Johns Hopkins University, the North Carolina State Division of Archives and
History, the Kentucky Historical Society, the Filson Club, the University of Pennsylvania
Archives and Records Center, Princeton University Library, the William R. Perkins Library at
Duke University, the Nicholas Murray Butler Memorial Library at Columbia University, and
Yale University Library. We found relevant documents in London at the Public Record Office,
the British Museum, the Institute of Historical Research, the Friends' House Library, and the
Lambeth Palace Library; in Edinburgh, at the Scottish Record Office and the National Library of
Scotland; and in Paris, at the French National Archives, where Jean Baker ably acted as
translator and guide. At all of these institutions we received the most courteous attention, for
which we are grateful.

Undoubtedly in such a cooperative enterprise a few names will remain obscured through
oversight A project of this nature, involving the collaboration of so many people, inevitably
results in omissions when writing acknowledgments. To those we have inadvertently forgotten we
extend our apologies and our sincere appreciation.