6 TWENTY-SIXTH ANNUAL REPORT

in this project now exist in the original in the various counties and in
two copies, one at the Hall of Records and the other in Salt Lake City.
We believe that they too are reasonably well protected and that nothing
further should be done about them. After 1850 the picture is less
satisfying. One hundred years later, in 1949, an Act was passed requir-
ing that microfilm copies of all deeds and mortgages recorded in the
counties be deposited in the Land Office, and this has been done. Per-
haps this is enough protection except that the Anne Arundel County
film should be removed from Annapolis and possibly the film of
Baltimore City and County and even Prince George's County ought to
go with it.

But there is a great gap between 1850 and 1949 in both land and
probate records which we have been working on for some years but
which is far from filled. At present, the basic probate records, the
Wills and Orphans' Court Proceedings, are finished on an average
through 1950. The Inventories and Accounts are done for about a
third of the counties. To bring all of these records up to date would
require perhaps half a year of the time of one operator, a task not to be
compared with that of filling the one-hundred-year gap in the land
records. The magnitude of that task may be judged by the fact that for
Baltimore City alone the land records for this period fill over 12,000
volumes, each of which is more than five hundred pages long. For-
tunately, about half of this has been done, and thirteen of the twenty-
three counties arc also finished. To get it all done within a reasonably
short time would be beyond our present ability. When our problem
was made dear to the Board of Public Works we were granted sufficient
funds to employ another photographer immediately and to provide
for the cost of film and travel. This stepped-up program will begin
January 1, 1962.

But it will not be the end of our problem. A single film copy, all
of it in Annapolis, will not guarantee the minimum protection which
we must have for the records of this period. We shall either have to
remove the whole collection to a safer area and thus lose the reference
use of the film or we shall have to make prints of the film. It is our
hope that we shall be able to provide the prints for storage elsewhere,
but the cost would be somewhere between $80,000 and $90,000, a
high price to pay for insurance and one we shall pay only as a last
resort.