ARCHIVIST OF THE HALL OF RECORDS 17

on the volume of Prince George's County Judgments which was initiated
some years ago under the joint sponsorship of the Hall of Records and
the Littleton-Griswold Committee of the American Historical Association.

Six months after its first appearance we were asked by Governor Lane
to bring out a second printing of the Maryland Manual The demand was
especially heavy as no earlier Manual had appeared during Governor Lane's
administration. It was not possible to revise this second printing as thor-
oughly as we would have liked because the printer had retained the type
and was able to make a favorable bid for the second printing as a con-
sequence. Such corrections as could be made without disturbing more than
a line were made, and all the changes in personnel, addresses, telephone
numbers, etc., which had occurred in the course of six months were
included. The Manual has now been entrusted to the Hall of Records
permanently, but it has not yet been decided whether it will become an
annual publication as a convenience to the General Assembly which will
begin holding annual sessions or whether it will continue to appear
biennially.

In order to facilitate the use of our indexes we have from time to
time prepared and mimeographed a guide for the use of the public. We
have found these bulletins to be most useful in the past and we expect that
our new guide, published in November, 1949, will prove to be equally
as valuable as its predecessors.

Thanks to the courtesy of the Clerk of the Court of Washington
County, we were able to bring from the Hagerstown Courthouse an old
index to Washington County Deeds. This index was quite adequate for
historical purposes and we have had it rehabilitated and rebound in two
volumes instead of the one original volume which was too heavy to be
bandied easily.

Our card indexing made better progress than usual. We concen-
trated for the most part on recently acquired probate papers from the
Eastern Shore. An especially valuable collection which we indexed was a
group of Dorchester County probate papers found in the courthouse at
Denton. These are especially important because, as you will recall, the
papers in the Cambridge courthouse burned in the great courthouse fire
of 1851. Indexing of the Caroline County marriage records was completed
during the year, and with this addition to our files we now have an impos-
ing—although far from complete—general index to Maryland marriages.

A list of aids to research of whatever type follows: