LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL

August 23, 1945.

To THE HONORABLE

HALL OF RECORDS COMMISSION,
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND

Gentlemen:

On June 1, 1935, the Land Office moved into the new
Memorial Hall of Records. During that summer several State
Governmental Agencies at Annapolis transferred their records
to the almost empty building. On October 1, Dr. James Alex-
ander Robertson assumed the duties of Archivist, and the Hall
of Records, the first State archival agency devoted exclusively
to the care of records, was opened. Before his death in 1939, Dr.
Robertson had received other records, primarily older records
and those of defunct offices which had been housed by the State
—until it should have its own depository—in the Maryland His-
torical Society, the Land Office and the Court of Appeals.
Shortly thereafter most of the early court and land records of
two counties, Anne Arundel and Baltimore, were transferred.

In the intervening ten years the Hall of Records has received
all of the non-current records of the State Government and most
of the historical records of five additional counties. With the
few exceptions noted elsewhere in this report ("Arrangement")
all of this material has been arranged; all of it has been un-
folded, boxed and made available for use. A catalogue was com-
piled and published in 1942, annual reports have been printed
each year since 1940, a Calendar of the Black Books was published
in 1942, an Index to the Maryland Line in the Confederate Army
appeared during the past year. The manuscript of Liber A
Prince George's County Court Records, prepared by the staff of
the Hall of Records, has been in the hands of the Littleton-Gris-
wold committee of the American Historical Association for the
last year, and will be published shortly.

Six mimeographed lists of record and index holdings have
been prepared and distributed and many hundreds of thousands