Industry sign banking maryland medical history online
alright then I'm gonna go ahead and do a quick introduction and then I'm gonna go ahead and turn the helm over to you thank you so much Suzanne Frasier from the Maryland State Archives rachel frazier serves as search room coordinator for the reference department at the Maryland State Archives in assisting patrons in-person and remotely of genealogical historical and legal research previously she has conducted biographical and historical research for the study of the legacy of slavery project under Chris Haley and has presented at events hosted by Maryland's local County Historical Society's the mid-atlantic regional archives conference the Montgomery County historic a history conference brochure College and the National Archives in her presentation today she will share with us some of the resources at the Maryland State Archives the emphasis will be on those that are helpful in building your family tree and in researching Maryland history including resources available online and from home keys all together thank you so much for having me it's such an honor to speak to everyone especially across the country I'm gonna turn on the screen share so that I can share slides with everyone and we know it when Suzanne and I were testing this earlier we noticed that I couldn't always see the chat feature so um Suzanna can either alert me if you want to chat or if you just want to yell out a question I'm happy to just we'll just converse and please feel free to interrupt me at any point during the the presentation okay so let's make sure the screen share works here make sure this comes up for everyone okay does everyone see the slide that's up yes it's beautiful oh thank you so this is the Maryland State Archives the building the way it looks today I'm gonna of course we'll be talking about genealogical and historical records at the Maryland State Archives with a focus on what you can get to home outside of the archives but first here's a little history of the Maryland State Archives we date back to 1935 so we date back to 1935 our original building was a small building in historic downtown Annapolis and it had 18,000 cubic feet of archival material and we thought that it would house materials till the year 2000 but it ran out of space in 1969 so we built this building here just outside historic downtown Annapolis and it was built in 1984 at the time that it was built it was the second largest installation of storage exceeded only by the Library of Congress we had 160,000 cubic square feet or cubic feet and we still ran out of space in the year 2000 so we have records here on-site for floors but we also have a huge off-site warehouse for modern court records and I'll explain why our holdings are so vast in a second but so the reason that our holdings are so gigantic is our mission as an agency is to be the central depository for government records of current value and since the since Maryland goes back as a colony to 1632 our records are quite vast and we go up to the modern day for a lot of things well into the 2000s so we focus on government records we also have special collections which are non government records which I'll talk about okay and psychic here I have a little bit of a delay hold on one second here I think it might be my my webcam okay so what I'm showing is just a tiny glimpse into what we have on site we have some exhibitions going on focusing on Frederick Douglass in our stacks there temperature-controlled four floors and also at the warehouse where we have for instance probate records are what's shown on the photograph there but we also deal with born-digital records and that's what a lot of archivists are worried about in the modern day of how how do you preserve emails and text messages and floppy discs and things like that okay so moving on since you're really going to focus on genealogy in history today we have both primary and secondary sources here we do have a small library with published sources we focus mainly on primary and primary sources are a good definition is an account of any events recorded by an eyewitness though that can include for government records it can be vital records which are birth death and marriage but it can also be records for when someone passes away for their estate like wills and inventories select probate records we also have court records that include land records court cases we have some military records for Civil War and Revolutionary Wars so those are all considered primary sources for our non government records that are special collections some of our most popular collections for genealogy and history are maps to help you see where someone lived historical newspapers historical photographs religious records like baptisms burial records and things personal letters and journals so there's so many things that can fall under our mission of preserving Marilyn's history um I do want to delve into a lot of those but I do want to highlight that when you're home a rule of thumb with what you can access of our records are you can get to scanned name indexes from home we currently have limited funding we're continually pushing for more funding as an agency we're not fully funded by tax dollars so we're applying the funding we have right now mainly to indexes to get those online as quick as possible currently most of our actual records are available just in person or by order but there are some really great exceptions that I'll talk about and when I mentioned name indexes their lists by name that usually reference a date that something occurred and give you sometimes a little extra information that can still be very helpful from home now what we usually recommend as a reference archivist and that means I'm the person along with my colleagues who helps people brainstorm the best kind of record to help you when you're trying to solve a genealogical problem or an historical research problem I usually try to suggest that if you can try to keep track of what is your number one burning question do you have names and dates and things like that that will help you and locations that will help you kind of focus your research and that's part of my job you don't have to know the exact dates and locations but it helps if you have a general a general idea um now unlike ancestry.com which I'm sure a lot of how many of you used ancestry.com yeah exactly and I do too yeah it's it's really helpful as a jumping-off point however they tend to have more federal records they're starting to get in some more state records but it's mainly federal and like a lot of state rec the State Archives we don't have a cumulative database to search a name and get all of the records we have like ancestry does just because of a funding issue so the reference archivists whether we're talking to you by email or if you're interact with our websites we've created for you it's meant to help you figure out what specific record type do you search to then try to find information so it is determining the record type as in do you want to search a death record and find something or a land record so it's just good to keep that in mind one of my favorite quotes is from the book still Alice and it says prioritizing hurt a reminder that the clock was ticking that some things would be left undone and that's how I feel every day what I'm trying to do research and I see it with the clients that I work with where a lot of times someone will come to me with a huge list of everything they want to get done it was which I'm the same way I want to do that too but it's easy to lose track of it so prioritizing your your goals of research is really helpful so this kind of leads into the archives research room we call that when you're here in person our search room but it does extend online when you're trying to research the same principles we have two main goals to preserve but also to make accessible for your research questions reservation means controlling the temperature in our storage or scanning records to preserve the originals but scanning them also makes it accessible either in person or online okay so talking about the actual research I do want to start with vital records because that's usually a top priority and trying to solve who are the parents when did someone pass away when were they born vital records are births deaths and marriages but the date ranges vary within each state for Maryland they begin creating births in Baltimore City in 1875 and and death records in Baltimore City in 1875 those dates are actually the same when they start they begin recording births and deaths in the counties that means all of Maryland except Baltimore City not until 1898 so pretty late one thing we do know I'm talking about the government records one thing we do right prior to these days is look at religious records and sometimes wills and other records so we do brainstorm with you but you'll notice that for birth records the time span that we can make accessible is fairly limited we actually stopped in 1924 and that is actually due to Maryland's law so they restrict birth records for a hundred years and so technically they're restricted up through 1919 but if you can provide proof of death we can actually work on a research order with you and get you access to anything between nineteen the nineteen nineteen twenty four now that's just talking about the original records that are not available from home the good news is birth record indexes and all the indexes here are all available from home and they're not restricted you can get a ton of information that way deaths we currently go up to the last ten years and the indexes ago I think up to 2014 so you can do a lot of great research and marriages technically glow from the colonial area era to 2011 but it's a little spotty in the colonial era so we tend to use religious records I do want to delve into this a little bit more but are there any questions right now yeah we do have a question so what we do you know about when she passed away or did he but did he die in Maryland or was he just born in Maryland in 1888 okay so for this time frame with a permit records it's too early for the government records because he dies prior to 1898 but what we would do is try to figure out if he and his family attended a religious institution the ANSI yes if you do know what religious institution you might have attended either a Methodist or Lutheran Church I don't have that information but if you know where he lives so what I'm gonna provide at the very end of the presentation is our email because I'm gonna encourage you to email when he was born and passed away and the Aires lived in and the denomination a Methodist or Lutheran to us we can see if we have religious records that could help you and some of our religious records are online sometimes they're still with the religious institution and we could connect you to them that would probably be the best bet for his timeframe to get his parents and there's a few other things we can try if you strike out with that yes absolutely so these dates are just government thankfully religious institutions were much better at recording births deaths and marriages prior to that and we're gonna actually delve into that further so because birth death and marriage records are so popular understandably working on revamping our website to have more helpful user guides so one well and actually should back up so one issue with many archives catalogs is they're hierarchical and it's different than a library catalog so hierarchical means you need to know the agency and then if there's a smaller department and then the timeframe and what the record was called to actually get the series which you can't know what you don't know so we create finding aids to actually make it accessible to normal people because it's I worked here 11 years and I still get lost with our catalog so I'm gonna show you a few things if we go to and I'll give you our web address but Maryland State Archives online you can even go to google and type in Maryland State Archives it takes you to our web page the guide to government records under our Quick Links is where we're placing well it has cataloged all of our government records but this is where we put finding aids that are very user friendly and I do want to point out that for vital records it is very helpful for tracing lineage providing dates but we also serve a lot of people who are dealing with legal emergencies they might need a marriage for Social Security or pension passport immigration things like that they might be looking at a family medical history and the death certificates for that so these are very much in demand in being able to do this research so when you go to our guide to government records and you click on our reference and research tab it brings up research guides I tend to focus people on the birth death and marriage that's what we're working on revamping right now but our next project will be probate records creating a guide or a finding aid for that as in Wills so the first one I'm going to take us to are the best of birth records this page does have a way for you to place an order from home for an actual original copy or a copy of an original record but it also has a find record link where it will take you at home to the actual indexes broken up by Baltimore City which you might see at the very bottom of the screen Baltimore City or the counties now your handouts for birth records you can download them right off this page as well they're the same handouts they're really helpful when you use these pages at home you're gonna see index is like this this is the cauchy's index for births it is all of the counties together and it's purely by last name what I love about that is you don't have to know where someone's born you just need a search by name and it's broken down just into smaller date ranges so it's really helpful Baltimore City has separate indexes for births and Baltimore City is I have a love-hate relationship for that with their indexes you'll see these indexes with they also so the previous one purely alphabetical Baltimore City goes by the first letter of the last name and then someone decided it would be fun to go by the first occurring vowel and then go chronologically I think it was a misguided effort to narrow down how much you had to look at so if you know the first you know first letter of the last name first occurring vowel and you only have to check part of the C's but when I explain it to a patron like a client just come in I'm like I'm gonna explain this to you I'm gonna sound crazy but just stick with me so that's why I also give you our email and website and phone number if you're ever using indexes and you get stuck because contact us so we don't really create our own indexes we try to learn about and interpret the indexes that were created historically a lot of times what made sense to a clerk who was working day in and day out they didn't really think ahead and say well this makes sense to someone a hundred years from now but good thing is you look at these indexes whether it's Baltimore City or the counties you get parents names and sometimes they'll even get the child's name so you can get a great amount of research and the exact date of birth so you get that research from home okay so moving on Oh any questions at this point I know I'm kind of okay so Ford I do want to mention okay for death records we are in the middle of revamping the death records website so until that happens we're giving out cheat sheets which are among your handouts that will help you get to the death record indexes from home the cheat sheet looks like this where it takes you to the guide to government records and has you find a jump by series box and a series of just a collection number the little cheat sheet gives you a series or collection number or the index is for different periods of time so you can type in your shortcut you can get to that index and hopefully in the next few months or our website to the committee which I'm on to for developing better finding aids it should debut on the website this is just temporary but you can search all the way back from the 88 late 1800s up to about 2014 for the indexes okay so I also want oh there he goes this is give you a quic
screenshot so when you go to our home page and you click on the guy to government records there is our jump by series box that's where you put the collection number or series to jump to the different death record indexes now if you try to get to the shortcut for the death certificates themselves it's not going to come up because of our funding limitations you can place an order through our website if you'd like or if you ever were planning a trip out here you can get person and print them for a dollar a page so but the indexes are quite helpful now marriage records we also have a finding aid we just debuted which we're excited about which looks very similar to the birth records marriages are one of our most complicated collections as they vary drastically by a timeframe by county all of that so that is why you really they view this finding aid that walks you through the time frame what county it's in and will actually tell you if there is an index before 1914 there are quite a few indexes to marriages going back to the late 1700s 1800s for instance this Baltimore County marriage index actually transcribes all of the information that's on the marriage record so for anything before 1914 is not going to be a certificate like the full page certificate it's going to be a single line ledger entry and that is the official marriage record so the index is transcribed everything so even though technically only indexes are available from home you really are getting to the information on the original record this way and also there is a minister listed so that is a great way to actually get to church records if you don't already know the church because we can help you find out what church did that ministers serve in so a lot of good things about the marriage records now after 1951 there's a statewide index so I should clarify pre-1914 and theirs it's kind of county by county unfortunately after 1951 it goes statewide and you probably noticed that I skipped a chunk of years I went from 1914 to 51 and that's because in that gap there's a lot of missing indexes or indexes that weren't created so long story short if you ever get stuck with your research you can email us and we can help you find out is there an index that will suit your needs especially World War 2 era they were having a hard time keeping up with all of the marriages and things like that going on but you'll notice from the indexes you can get made a name through the marriage indexes so it's it's very helpful how is everyone doing I know I'm kind of moving fast I want to squeeze a lot of great information in but any questions don't know okay good so we're talking about birth death and marriage and I do want to delve into probate records one of the reasons I want to mention that is they're very helpful prior to the creation of death records to learn more about family members so it can give you the date someone died which is wonderful but it also says who did a person interact with who are they the queefing property to and even if they died without a will in maryland you have to in most places you have to file inventories of what they owned and one of my favorite records it seems very dry but it's awesome our administration accounts those are accounts of who received what from it from an estate so we've been able to discover names of children names of siblings things that were not otherwise known about a person so they were wonderful and the best news about probate records is some of the original records are actually we actually got some fine to put funding to put online from home so I'm going to talk about that the way probate records are organized in Maryland is we have one wonderful master index for colonial probate records and that's well 1777 earlier it's just a name index and it will tell you the book and page a will is filed in and we'll also mention the other types of Records after 1777 onwards Register of Wills is filed county by county and those records have indexes online but not the actual records but that single searchable index for probate records for the colonial period will lead you to the actual wills online from home so definitely worth keeping that in mind and if you contact us through the help desk we're happy to give you extra help with searching probate records because they still can be a little bit of a challenge and we hope to have probably by the end of the year if not early next year a new finding aid dedicated specifically to that ok so moving on from probate records the theme so far has been indexes are online for the most part mostly original records you have to be here or place an order maryland land records maryland land records they're all online the indexes the actual records whether it's a deed a mortgage insert indentured servitude manumission certificates of freedom they are all online which we are very excited about and that is I'd mentioned we have some limitations in funding so the Maryland judiciary and General Assembly funded this and it goes from the oldest land records in Maryland up to the last couple of weeks of modern deeds so there is a handout that is for MD land rec net and if you look at that handout there are bullet points on the first page those bullet points talk about certain historical land records the rest of the the guide talks more about modern land records so if you're doing gee older genealogy focus on those bullet points and they'll help you search name indexes get the book and page something is filed on and look at the actual deed now I will say I use land records a lot but I don't use them that much for the land itself I use it more again when it comes to genealogy to find out who someone enter acted with I was able to discover that a man had a son we didn't know about because he sold his property to his son and so it fills in a lot of blanks it also helped me once when I was researching I thought I was researching to different people Enoch Howard and George Howard but land records helped me discover he was alternating between his first name and his middle name and I'd been researching one person the whole time so it's a very helpful website it's also great because especially in the colonial and 19th century mid to early 19th century babe they didn't have as many courts as we have now they filed a lot of records through the land office that were not land so we've done research on african-americans in Maryland and people who were buying their own freedom certificates of freedom or purchasing family members to free them through land records that is all online so extremely helpful in doing family research and historical research and again this all from home completely ok that does bring up the study of the legacy of slavery in Maryland that is through our website and if you type in legacy of slavery in Maryland and Google it's going to come up this is a grant funded research project that draws not only from land records but also newspapers census records newspaper ads of buying or selling or someone who's fled it is even military records things that really can help build more information and so it is a free website since it's grant funded they don't have all of the counties but quite a few so a fantastic website and which I will mentor chol back to a little bit later about Wow court records I want to mention briefly just because they they are helpful in things like it can be divorces or criminal records anything that gives you more of it what kind of footprints your ancestors left throughout history a very common complaint from genealogists I work with is their ancestors were too well behaved and they're not finding anything about them so court records can be a big help the only unfortunate thing about court records is they are the collections of them are massive I mean we have records Center boxes here and in our gigantic off-site warehouse that are so massive we just don't have the staff to scan them but we do have some indexes online we could connect you with if you can email us with like the specific or j.vin general timeframe and where you think someone lived but they're a little limited with what's online so as to kind of make up for that a really good website is Archives of Maryland online it doesn't have so much modern court records but it has a lot of judicial legislative records from the colonial period up through a little bit more recently and the reason for that is they're trying to document the records that really helped found Maryland's government you can get to fairly recent acts of the General Assembly but it can really be helpful if you're trying to find say a court record from the colonial period they actually had to file divorces through the General Assembly of Maryland so in the colonial period so you will find some court records there and you can search the entire site it has some military records executive records of the government governor and things like that so Archives of Maryland online is a little misleading because it sounds like it's our entire archives online which it's not it's the name of a volume set of very large volumes that almost an encyclopedia that we've digitized so definitely keep that on your radar Rachel can I ask a question yes on the archives of Maryland online if you open up any one of those is a keyword searchable well are they indexed in any way shape or form yes so there's a few ways you can search it if you click on it one of the volumes it will have a search bar where you can search because they've been transcribed which is fantastic you also have I think unfortunate my screen shot didn't cut it off a little bit but there's going to be a search bar for the entire site on the top right as well so yes you can search the volumes and you can search the entire site so that helps you kind of being able to search the volumes can help you narrow it down by timeframe and the menu on the left hand side that can help you go by category which can help narrow things down as well I see now once you're in and you can do a keyword search do you use just traditional boolean's searching strategies like quotation marks to keep the words in order that kind of thing I'm glad you asked that question because unfortunately it's very it is limited we created this I want to say in the 90s and we have and with our funding and we of course you didn't get a chance to update it yet so it's very simple in that it doesn't really get quotation marks but if you put in a string of keywords it will search for those keywords in a document if you put in and or or it will literally look for the words and an or so unfortunately it's not as intelligent as that but that's on our wish list to someday have updated thank you oh absolutely a good question okay so we've bring up the really top collections that are most helpful with Maryland genealogical research that are government records especially the ones you can get to from home I'd love to delve into our special collections which are non government records and our special collections so I should actually back up a bit so for government records we actively work with agencies to bring in these kurz to establish collections with them things like that special collections people and instance and private institutions have to approach us and say I am choosing to donate this to the Maryland State Archives so it can vary sometimes with religious records we might have a collection or they might have chosen to donate their collection to like a local Historical Society so but again the contact information I'll give you can always contact us and we can try to find out who has what collection that said we have very a very vibrant collection of special collections so that can include cartographic collections maps and drawings it can have photographs journals Diaries newspapers and religious records and other types of records so like we had talked about earlier they're especially useful for the time frame when vital records are a bit limited okay and one of my favorite collections that we have online are the historical photographs of Maryland now it's not all of our photographic collections because it's pretty vast but we've been working on processing more and more and posting them online which you can search by keyword the you can go to our home page and it is on our home page or you can type in the web address which is hist pix dot M sa dot Maryland gov and it brings up some wonderful varieties of collections now one of the top questions I get when it comes to historical photographs is can I search for my ancestors name and find a photograph of them so the way that our catalog for the for Special Collections for photographs works is we catalog what the photographer gave us as information so for instance this photograph the photographer wrote on the back that it was four women in front of a famous local DJ hoppy Adams car on cars Beach which was a segregated Beach in Maryland that had a very strong history and many photographs that really are a time capsule but the sad thing is we we as an art the archivists here we don't know the names of the women in this photograph but someone who's doing family research if they search cars Beach they may recognize an ancestor and I think I see a hand up yes I think I'm Lucy I'm so sorry I'm only getting a few few bits of what you're saying oh he wants to know the website of how to access the photographs yes I'm gonna back let me actually back up one second so you can either go to google and type in historical photographs of Maryland there's a link on our home page but you can also write down and this is how I get to it is guest pics as in history pictures so hist Hicks H is T P I see s dot M si as in Maryland State Archives dot maryland.gov and Suzanne I think you'd mentioned the webinar will be made available to everyone afterwards to crimp Oh awesome okay so that link will be in the slides of the webinar as well and yes it's a great resource any other questions from right now okay I just want to make sure I didn't miss anyone or anything okay so again a lot of there's not many photographs that are they actually have a person's name so we encourage people to search for areas that they know ancestors or people lived in and you can find great photographs that way another example here is women in a canoe on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and we don't have their names but again searching areas people lived in famous landmark like the canal and you're starting to get photographs of people throughout history Oh probably the most common question of how do I find my ancestors photograph the second most common it's people trying to research an historical building whether it's a place they're living or a place may be an ancestor lived and they'll usually say if I type in the street address will I find the building in your photographs well usually not we often aren't don't have the street address in the photographs but we always try to put the street so for instance we have an unknown photographer we actually don't know who took this awesome photo though we know it's a leather goods store on Baltimore Street so if you knew the street someone lived on from sale and records and you search that street name in our photographs you never know what you're going to find bill architectural historians use our collections quite a bit as well if they're restoring a building to get it back to its original original state and I love this photograph especially the huge wobbly trunk that's advertising with their stories okay so we've talked about photographs newspapers also fantastic resource for genealogy another good resource for the time frame prior to birth and death records because you can find baptismal announcements birth marriage death announcements in these records now not all of our newspapers are digitized most of them are scanned when you come and visit us in person so in order to try to make these resources more available from home our director of Special Collections Maria de who's awesome she's been working with the universities of Maryland to create a partnership where they would help us propel provide funding also take some of the newspapers in their own collections and ours and put more and more of them on from home and that's something with with the State Archives State H
storical Society's county level societies and libraries where when funding is limited which is a very common issue for for many institutions partnerships are hugely helpful so if you go to our home page at the Maryland State Archives and you click on find records on that top blue bar on the home page and it's highlighted in yellow here if you click on find records it brings up under the Browse by record a list of our catalogs and there's the guy to government records there's Maryland land records but special collections there's the home page for that if you click on it it will then take you there we go um to where you can click where you'll actually see tabs along the very top of the Special Collections homepage where it says home biographies maps newspapers photos and religious records and if you click on the newspapers on the Left will actually and I'll explain what this homepage says so you can browse by title date timeframe county that's more helpful when you're here in person because it takes you to what's available online I'm available on site so instead on the left hand side on that menu where it says special collections home browse newspapers and then it says digital newspapers you click on digital newspapers it takes you to what we do have online from home and it's alphabetical by the newspapers title when this project for our partnership first started we had 8 now it's gotten to this point and I'll show you how much we have I mean it's it's a lot and it's for many it's many different counties so if you see a Queen Anne's record that's Eastern Shore Maryland and then we have st. Mary's enterprise which is Southern Maryland on the western shore we have Montgomery independent and Montgomery County Sentinel which are very close to DC so you can really do a lot of research from Maryland genealogy and history through this one thing I will mention about looking through historic Maryland newspapers and you may all have already run into this yourself with just newspapers in general these are not these are actually not text searchable you have to browse them if there's many things on our wish list you know somebody maybe have them transcribed but currently they're not text searchable so what I've done when I've been researching them is if you browse a few issues you start to pick up on where at what page they have the ads on what page tends to have local news and after a while you see you're able to browse fairly quickly knowing what page to kind of return to with each issue so they can be very helpful and I would highly recommend you taking advantage of this resource I have a question sure does your archive work with chronicling America at the National Archives or the Library of Congress I believe so I'm not positive that would be a good question for me to check with Maria day on because I know she's had different partnerships over time um I'm not sure I'll see if I can find out and I'll let you know so you can pass it on to everyone thank you sure okay and so we talked about photographs and newspapers I do want to mention religious records because we we've mentioned that a quite a bit in our talk so far because religious records are great for that period prior to births and deaths or this can happen to where we find a death record for someone this is actually the example that actually happened to me yesterday and happens quite a bit where someone's born before they're creating birth records so let's say it's 1850 that they're born and since Baltimore City doesn't start till 1875 and the rest of Maryland don't start til age 98 there's no government birth records but they let's say they die in 1930 we found the death record and the informant who was providing or who was a family member who was providing the information did it know or was just distraught and could not recall the names of the parents we pull up the death certificate and it says unknown for father and unknown for mother so we still were back to square one so the religious records are great prior to births and deaths but they're also great for filling in the gaps for unknown information now on our website you'd still go to our home page and go to our Special Collections homepage and there's the religious records tab now you can browse just by the title of the church or by the denomination or the county it can be information overload which is why you can always email us or call us but for instance I searched for all hallows parish in Anne Arundel County and we fortunately have quite a few collections from them just like with the newspapers our director of Special Collections has been trying to get more and more of the church records religious records online from home she is an immense an incredible Department of two people so it's slow going but for instance here you'll notice the links if you see an active link under a church records collection you can get to it from home so even though yeah even though it's it kind of varies for each church we're trying to get them get them online okay and speaking of that make sure I did one second yeah okay so yeah so when it comes to religious records you can browse by title county date frame but honestly one thing I do want to bring up is we list in our religious records guide all of the historical churches we know of existing in Maryland's his and they actually put on the on the collection if we have a collection or self if there is no link to collections like this just please contact us because we can try to find out who does have the collection to try to help you in your research okay so the last special collection type that I want to mention which has been really helpful to research are our maps what I'm showing on the screen here this is a map from 1850 by JC Sydney it's a map of Baltimore County and what's wonderful about this map is what it shows in comparison to earlier maps when we look at maps prior to the mid-1800s they might show rivers towns you know maybe a railway they don't tend to show where people live Daria around 1850 into the 1860s there are several cartographers sydney there was also a cartographer whose last name is martinet who were creating these highly detailed maps of each county and district of each county of maryland and people could pay to have their names listed on the map so it is really a goldmine there's you times when you're gonna be researching someone who decided I don't want to pay to have my name on the map and they're not on there but that's where census records can really help so if you can find census records from the 1850s and 60s and make a note of the neighbors you're the person who you're researching chances are in my experience that at least one of them had their name put on the map so if you can't find the person you're researching you will probably find a neighbor who's gonna still help you place where they're living it's also been helpful for archaeologists because there can be churches and historic school houses cemeteries things that no longer stand and have been buried literally underground that they can now find where they stood so they're helpful in so many ways and these maps 1850s 1860s they are available online from home because going back to partnerships the study of the legacy of slavery through their grants have made the interactive maps we call them the interactive maps made them available online from home through their website so you'd want to go to study of the legacy of slavery interactive maps and you would click on that and select the county going all the way down through the the levels of detail it's also called interactive because if we were able to build a biography through the the research grants for the study of the legacy of slavery if we were able to build a biography then if you click on that person's name you'll be able to see if a biography has been generated permanency generated it's done by blood sweat and tears you'll be able to see the biographies there and it's it's really a great a great resource any questions before I move on I always ask because I'm a little paranoid that I'm gonna miss someone who's at the corner farther for me so okay so we covered government records special collections a reminder when you're doing your research your detective and be proud of it keep lists of what you find and also and I can say this as a reference archivist where I've learned the hard way and I try to pass it on to people what you don't find is just as important as what you do find so if you let's say you've been researching death indexes year by year or you've been going through marriage records keeping a list of where you don't find information so you don't accidentally go back and have to redo it so that can be a real help especially with our indexes where you're not going to be able to type in a name and get to everything you do have to often go through chunks of timeframes and years it'll definitely help you keep keep things organized and so I hope that is really helpful I do want to make sure that you have our website and email address which is our website is MSA dot maryland.gov and i'm also giving you our email the emails on the website I really want to make sure you have it as well so it is M s a as in Maryland State Archives and that's dot helpdesk one-word together at Maryland gov now the the phone number on our website it's a general number that would take you to a menu to make selections I am giving you the number that goes directly to people we are a small but mighty staff so sometimes you have to leave a voicemail or you might have to call back occasionally but we work really hard on answering all of your calls and questions so you can always call us but I would actually recommend starting with the email especially if it's per genealogy because it really helps us to be able to look through your email at the information you're providing so we can really look in-depth and in helping you so email is actually best just for us to communicate with you and really assist you and one other thing I did want to mention if you go to our home page which you can do through Google just going to Maryland State Archives you can type it into Google or you can go to our type in our website there are links to Facebook and several other social media accounts at the very bottom of our page there's an email list that you can subscribe to we never spam you or send you a million things you just get usually a monthly newsletter if there's perhaps something new has been posted online or there's a special event or things like that that would be interesting to be kept abreast of we also have volunteer programs many of them are on site but there is a volunteer program for actually helping us transcribe records that don't have indexes that you can even do from home so you see on our email list check it out our website there's a lot of resources that can be interesting so thank you so much for letting me speak does anyone have any questions yeah we do have some questions go ahead before I'm sorry for immigrants coming over in their early 1700s ship manifest right so although we don't have a lot of ships manifest one thing that's very helpful is there's a few things that are helpful newspapers have helped us a ton in that timeframe we're discovering when people are arriving and when ships are arriving another thing is the early settlers of Maryland that is through our guide to government records that you can search and it will list people who are settlers as well as the lists of other people who are immigrating whether it's indentured servants etc who are coming in another resource would be actually those are probably the top two resources the last resource we have is naturalization and immigration indexes the only issue is those are a bit spotty in the colonial period because they didn't keep very strong records of that now one thing that might help is I know the National Archives I believe the Baltimore City archives have some ships manifests but a lot of them didn't survive so we tend to look through the early settlers of Maryland index to see we can find and we also sometimes even look at land records because they might list people who are coming in to work land and things like that so we have to kind of use some Plan B's and if you get every if you can email us even your question of who you're trying to find we could help you even brainstorm further and more questions okay I have a few questions when you send in an email request for assistance for research assistance does it acknowledge like does it open up a ticket and then you get like an email in return saying that you know your emails been received you know because I do a lot of emailing of libraries and archives in my research and I found that some sites will acknowledge that you know that you know you've submitted it and you know you don't have to sit there click ten times wondering if it's submitted or not what is you know what is the response after you click on email to the help desk there's a couple of things if you're in MD land wreck net and you send an email through that about land record research you do get a response vaccine you received it for the help desk you would actually send that through your own email account and we don't actually have an automated response yet to come back we are working on trying to respond quickly just to let you know we got your email and that would be a human being responding but we're working on trying to keep keep you up to date even if we're still looking into your question we'll try to follow up with you and say well be in touch with you sooner looking into this so let em deal and Rick does send you a generated response we're pretty quick with our turnaround time with the general helpdesk emails and so you will be hearing back from someone usually within a couple of business days or so great okay then I have a couple of more questions just generally speaking this is more of a librarian question just generally speaking about how what's the percentage on a daily basis of where you have your genealogy questions versus non genealogy questions so we've we've tried to calculate that before too and it seems to be about 50/50 maybe waited a little bit heavier towards genealogy but what we find is for genealogy questions we get a lot of new people each day but there's also a lot of long-term researchers who are either emailing us or coming in person repeatedly for legal questions it's usually a one-time visit so someone just is at one legal document but the number of people to be hire for legal requests but it kind of still balances out so it's about 50/50 okay now if someone was to like go visit Marilyn like for instance I have relatives in Baltimore and if I were gonna go visit them and I wanted to stop by your archives what would be your advice that I should bring with me okay so there's a few things I could suggest well first I'll give you our hours and those are on our website but we're Tuesdays through Fridays 8:30 to 4:30 and we are open the first Saturday of each month currently and what we recommend is um so if you can bring names dates and locations and prioritize your top you know your number one question but then keep your list of other things you want to discover but it's really names dates and places that you happen to know and it does not have to be exact just a jumping-off point our search room has we've started to implement best practices for archives as far as safety so we do have people lock up things like bags folders and notepads so if you can bring like a small steno pad to keep notes on we also give you note paper so also we encourage people to bring their cell phones cameras laptops if you have a lot of things like saved on through ancestry or on your computer definitely bring your laptop or iPad or even just your cell phone and camera because we encourage you to use your laptop but also we encourage people to take pictures of our records as long as your flash is off so I know some some there are some places that don't allow photography we highly encourage it and we even have a small photo stand with really good lighting to photograph records so definitely bring a camera or camera phone spice a high speed I'm sorry I I lost the audio for a second oh so we do now it kind of varies s
when someone when something's been scanned already so for instance a lot of our probate records and vinyl records newspapers things like that are scanned and on the computers which you can just print for a dollar a page or you can photograph off the screen but we do have quite a few high-speed scanners that provide excellent images for orders the one thing to be aware of is if you decide to order like a high quality image of something there are fees involved just because we're not fully supported by tax dollars and the fees are the same in person or if you place an order from home so if you say wanted to order a copy of a marriage certificate or a court record or things like that the fees are twenty five to thirty five dollars that does include the paper certified paper copies and an electronic image since your email if you ask for that when people come here in person we try to do a lot of scanning when they're there in our search our staff search or scanner it's not a patron scanner we'd love to eventually have one in the search room for our patrons but we're trying to see if we can get the money for that so for now it's a staff scanner and we also have an entire scanning department that can deal with oversized materials that produce beautiful images and also do you have like like like a traditional library do you have like books on family histories like particular surnames that kind of thing yes so we have a wonderful it's a non circulating library so although unfortunately the books cannot be checked out it's a great local resource if you can come in person to look at there are books on family names there are also books on areas such as cemetery records of Anne Arundel County or Revolutionary War records things like that and so there's also books on women's women's history African American history war of 1812 Revolutionary where really there's a huge variety and our librarian has been ordering more so it's a vibrant collection that you can actually search on our home page if you click on find records the same to get to our Special Collections catalog it will get our library catalog to see what we have and there's a lot of books that are even out of print so our library includes books that are modern books 21st century publications and research materials all the way back to books that were published in the 17 and 1800's so you can get a really nice variety of library resources that you may not even be able to find elsewhere or you can find them on Amazon for us I've looked them up for hundreds of dollars so it's a good free resource if you can come in person now for the books that are out of print are there any plans you know of course funding of available you know as a provision but are there plans to digitize and he's those out of out of copyright books so I know that that is a hope for our librarian she has actually been working on digitizing some of the more modern ones but I do want to give you a resource because it's so our library department is actually one person it's our librarian and she's incredible but she's one person so she has to prioritize what she's doing and sometimes digitization just you know cannot happen as quickly as she hopes so a great resource is archive.org and that is an online resource where they're trying to scan these out of print books and get them online and I'm finding more and more of these out of print maryland resources on that website so it's either it's archive.org if you type it in Google it might say archive it um but definitely look into that it's a good resource from home for sure okay and then I don't did I don't believe he covered adoption records did you uh I didn't you know I meant you thank you so much so adoption records are there are some legal constraints so adoptions are actually sealed starting June 1st 1947 onward up to the present day prior to that they're just among our equity records which are like civil records and they're not restricted they are not online but the indexes are they're just equity indexes now one thing to keep in mind is mid 1900s and earlier we have noticed that sometimes adoptions are not formalized sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't but they're not as stringent but if the adoption occurred you can contact us because there's a different index we're on equity records including adoptions pre 1947 for each county and also a separate one for Baltimore City that we could make available to if you emailed us we could get you the right collection and everything cuz it really varies by timeframe in M County and we can help you search those to see what you could find our indexes if you found something that looked like a a possible match you actually can place an order if it's a case that's more than 20 pages it's actually a $50 fee for us to scan the entire case and send that those scans to you under that it's just $25 but it can be a really great resource if it was formalized for sure and then I wanted to thank you for what a great tip that was on the the minister's name on the extracted marriage records to look for more church records under that ministers name I thought that was an excellent tip oh thank you absolutely and I should mention on I have not found this book online yet but people have contact us by email and we can check it for you in arts in our library we have a two-volume set of a book called Maryland's ministers and the churches they served by Agnes Kane Lee and that's kan Bly and she is she's incredible with what she created because you can go alphabetically by the minister's names and see what churches they served for different time frames and it goes from I want to say sixteen or late 1600s up to the 1990s so it's really really thorough Wow it's one of my favorite resources and obviously it's not it may not be on line but you could always email us if you let's say one of you is looking at our online index and you see him in the service name please contact us by email we'll see we'll check the book for you and see who's what Church it is last question I'm curious about the administration accounts wouldn't you like for you to get to open up one and show what everyone you know show everybody what it looks like yeah let me see that if I can do this on a screen grab hold on one second here okay now does everyone still see my screen we see a gray screen but I'm not sure what your screen is showing right now let me try I'm gonna try Firefox and see if maybe that lets us I know it seemed to be a angry at Chrome earlier so I'm here and now we see a blue screen ah so this okay I'm going to open to Firefox and see if it sees it if not could I email you an image to share with the class yeah no problem I could be more than happy to do that I'm just what one looks like I will actually do is I will email you an image so you can see what it looks like and if you have the contact you have the contact info for everyone in the class to send it out to them yes I do have an email 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