50 TWELFTH ANNUAL REPORT

name, place and date of probate, reference to liber and folio of
the record, and the cost of a photographic reproduction of the
document. All of this can be done in a few minutes without
examining the document, except to estimate the cost of a repro-
duction, which requires only a count of pages.

What should be our reply if he asks for the names of the
heirs or of the executors? When was the will written? Who
were the witnesses? Information of this kind may be found by
glancing at the document, if the searcher is skilled to do it; and
while we disapprove on principle, in practice we will furnish this
information. But somewhere we must stop, and we have chosen
as a convenient place the point at which we are asked the terms
of the will. That usually requires a careful reading and a long
letter. We will certainly not furnish the names of the parents
of the deceased, for that would require a search through all the
documents of the period bearing the same name, as parents are
not usually mentioned in a will. To sum up—in general we will
furnish only the information which is to be found in our indexes,
without a fee and without complaint. We make exceptions, of
course, but we recognize them as exceptions.

This refusal to solve a problem for an individual may annoy
him when he is aware that a little time on our part would be all
that is required, while it would mean an expensive trip or the
employing of a professional researcher for him to accomplish the
same result. Our justification is that in the end, by refusing
what is time-consuming, we may devote ourselves to the pre-
paration of more indexes and other finding mediums and thus
ever extend the field of service which we can give free of charge
and to every inquirer. As a result of following this program we
now have perhaps the most useful name index in the country.
In any case, a searcher need not be stopped by our refusal to
study documents. We will provide him, gratis, with a list of
materials having to do with the person in whom he is interested,
and he may order copies of one or all of them at little cost.

Unindexed materials present a special problem. It is ob-
viously impossible to search a county court record series in the