ARCHIVIST OF THE HALL OF RECORDS 25

space for the current records of his office. Evidence of this is seen
in the fact that records dating after 1788 were received from several
offices.

The red-letter day of the year in regard to accessions was Feb-
ruary 8, 1946. On that day, records were received from the offices
of the Clerk of the Circuit Court and the Register of Wills of Kent
County and from the same offices in Queen Anne's County. The
Kent County Court records are especially noteworthy. The Land
Records appear to be complete from 1648 to 1790, although only
transcripts of some of the earlier volumes are preserved. Some of
the early Court Proceedings are missing and there are occasional
gaps later on, but the situation was much better than we had ex-
pected, for the usually reliable Louis Dow Scisco had reported in
his article on "Colonial Records of Kent County" (Maryland His-
torical Magazine XXI, pp. 356-361) that the Court records had
"mostly disappeared. " Very likely the records were stored in some
out-of-the-way place when Scisco visited the County and thus he
did not see them.

The transfer of the Land Records of Queen Anne's County was
postponed, because our Photocopyist is already engaged in copying
the Land Records of three other counties. But all the other records
of the Clerk's Office through 1788 have been transferred. The Court
Proceedings are fairly complete, and like many of the Kent County
Court Proceedings are still in their original parchment bindings.

The records received from the Registers of Wills of Kent and
Queen Anne's Counties were exceptionally fine and complete, al-
though there are a few gaps in the latter series. These gaps are rel-
atively unimportant since they fall within the period when the Pre-
rogative Court served as the central probate court of the province
and duplicated to a large extent the records of each county. Such
losses are more than compensated for by the presence of large col-
lections of original papers for each county. The papers contain thou-
sands of signatures and seals and should prove valuable to students
of family history.

A similar collection of original probate papers for Baltimore
County dating from 1664 to 1788 was delivered to the Hall of Re-
cords by the Register of Wills of Baltimore City.