FIRST TO FOURTH ANNUAL REPORTS

EARLY HISTORY OF MARYLAND ARCHIVES

The problem of the proper care and preservation of govern-
mental records has troubled the State of Maryland, as it has other
states, almost from the beginning of this Province. The General As-
semblies of the 17th century made repeated examinations of the
public records, and their reports often bristled with criticisms and
recommendations. The elaborate care provided at the time of the
removal of the records from St. Mary's City to Annapolis in the
last decade of the century is characteristic of this concern.

Not much was accomplished, however, in those early days un-
til 1716 when a special committee provided for a great deal of copy-
ing of records which had badly deteriorated. The proceedings of that
committee, containing full lists of the work accomplished, are now
preserved in the Hall of Records, and the volumes copied at that
time are for the most part easily recognized and still in use. From
time to time less ambitious projects of this kind were undertaken
during the Colonial period, but at the time of the Revolution the
state of the public records was generally unsatisfactory.

Resolution No. 44 of the December Session 1834 marked an
important step in the effort to improve the care of public records.
This resolution directed the State Librarian to survey all of the rec-
ords then stored in the various State offices, to list them in detail
and to recommend ways and means of improving the situation
then admittedly bad. This was the first time that the Assembly had
gone outside its own ranks for its record work and the first appear-
ance, therefore, of what would now be called an Archivist in Mary-
land. Three excellent reports of the Librarian, David Ridgely, were
duly prepared and published in 1835 and 1836. Previously the As-
sembly had had to deal with the care of records of defunct offices,
but it had never thought to redistribute the records in wholesale fash-
ion among offices which were equipped to take care of them. This
proposal on the part of Ridgely must have been considered revolu-
tionary at that time—it was a first step in the direction of the modern
archives devoted exclusively to record-keeping for other offices. It is
not possible to know whether Ridgely's recommendations were
carried out fully but it is certain that they were carried out in part.