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Governor John Seymour and the Charters of Annapolis

Acknowledgments

        For encouragement and assistance during the many months I have been writing this essay I owe thanks to several people. Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse, State Archivist and Commissioner of Land Patents of Maryland first suggested that we put the article on the State Archives' website and has provided me with information when I needed it. I thank him also for his generosity in the matter of citations. I thank Dr. Jean Russo, Research Archivist and Associate General Editor of the Archives of Maryland Online, for her careful reading of the manuscript and for catching some errors and making suggestions, for responding to my questions, for her patience in our discussions through e-mail of my citations, and for her work in matching some of my citations with the entries on the new shelf lists at the State Archives. We are also using Dr. Russo's transcriptions of the Historic Annapolis/Maryland State Archives copy of the second charter, of the copy of the second charter in Chancery Record 2, and of the vellum/parchment copy, also at the State Archives.

        Also at the State Archives, we thank Ms. Jennifer Hafner, Deputy Director of Research, Archives of Maryland Online, who has done most of the huge amount of work, including the tedious and time-consuming job of linking my sources to the proper places in the volumes of the Archives of Maryland Online, in preparing the manuscript for inclusion on the website.

        Unless otherwise noted, all original records are at the State Archives in Annapolis.

        Dr. Gregory Stiverson, President of the EnVISIONing ANNAPOLIS Foundation, read an early draft of the article and had some useful comments. Ms. Jane McWilliams of Annapolis saved me from an inexcusable blunder by suggesting that early in the article I should discuss the "Act for keeping good Rules and Orders in the Port of Annapolis" of 1696 rather than jump straight into the charters of Annapolis themselves. I also thank her for her patient discussions through e-mail of various ambiguities in the difficult documents we have been trying to understand -- on some of which ambiguities we have agreed respectfully to disagree -- and for her careful reading of the manuscript, her suggestions, and her corrections.

        In Washington, we thank Jeffrey M. Flannery, Head of the Reference & Reader Services Section in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, for sending us information from the Colonial Office Papers.

        In England, we thank Tim Padfield, Information Policy Consultant of the Information Policy and Services Directorate at The National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, for responding quickly to our question about copyright, and Paul Johnson, The National Archives Image Library Manager, Kew, Surrey, for sending us images of the copy of the second charter in The National Archives of England and for his help regarding permission to reproduce the second charter on the web.

        Finally, once again I thank Beverly Ann for her support and for her patience in listening to my long and enthusiastic explanations of conclusions that turned out to be wrong and of an occasional conclusion that turned out to be right. As we already knew but learned again, in writing something such as this there are a lot of dead ends, but we believe that the remaining conclusions and explanations will withstand scrutiny. Beverly has also transcribed the first charter of Annapolis, the petition to Governor John Seymour, and the copy of the second charter from The National Archives of England and has done some of the coding to prepare the manuscript for the web. She has also often been the only thing that has stood between me and madness when I am working on my computer.