ARCHIVIST OF THE HALL OF RECORDS 49

not reside within the state or county in which the record office
is located. Again, some depositories do not have funds for cor-
respondence and will not answer an inquiry unless a stamped
envelope or post card is enclosed. Finally—and this is the shab-
biest treatment of all—there appears to be, in some quarters, an
accepted but unofficial fee without which no record can be found.

Of the inquiries received at the Hall of Records there are,
of course, many which we cannot answer, either because the
records do not exist at all or because they are not in our custody.
In the first case we are careful to point out that the record was
never kept, as, for example, for colonial immigrants to Maryland,
or that they were kept but have been lost, as in the case of the
records of Calvert and St. Mary's Counties, which were destroyed
in courthouse fires. In the second case—that is, records not in
our custody—we are careful to point out that while Maryland
recorded its vital statistics in the colonial period they are to be
found in Church rather than in State records. If the information
wanted has been the subject of a printed work, we will refer the
inquirer to this work. This service requires, in addition to a
knowledge of our own records, a study of the general record his-
tory of the State, of printed materials relating to these records,
and a knowledge of the Maryland holdings in other depositories
of this State, of the great agencies of the Federal Government,
and of certain of the larger depositories throughout the country,
such as the Huntington Library, the Library of the City of New
York, and the Southern Historical Collection of the University
of North Carolina. The objection that this kind of service is ex-
travagant is not valid: if not the professional archivist, who
should know what the record holdings of this country are?

But if the records are available at the Hall of Records, we
are faced with our most difficult problems. In the first place, how
much time should we give to the inquiry of an individual? If he
comes in person, there is no problem; but assume that he writes.
He may ask whether we have the will of a certain George Brown.
In that case we examine our will indexes, and we normally will
give him the information given on the index card: the exact