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Bar News - April 7, 2006 Rescuing Old Court Records Reprinted by permission from the Keene Sentinel of March 6, 2006 Deep in the basement of the Cheshire County courthouse are the files of a divorce case, from well over a century ago, in which the plaintiff tells how his wife abused him terribly: Among other indignities, she hit him on the head with a bar of soap and threw a fully loaded chamber pot at him. The record shows that the wife had the gall (and apparently the grounds) to countersue; the judge awarded her the divorce. The case is one of many thousands from the late 1700s through 1899 that, but for the Herculean efforts of a small group of volunteers, would be lost to history - either consumed by worms or wasted away by mold or crumbled in dust. The papers, now neatly cataloged and partly boxed in acid-free containers, represent the most complete archive of county court records in the state of New Hampshire. The files include divorce records, civil and criminal case documents, naturalization papers, Revolutionary War pension applications and a lot of accidental stuff, including a short treatise on music theory from the 18th century and a promotional flier for handcuffs from the 19th century. Sometime this summer, the files will be transported to the New Hampshire Division of Archives and Records Management, which is expanding its quarters in Concord. The authorities there praise the rescue effort in Keene, which began a couple of years ago when a writer preparing a history of state prison inmates came looking and found box upon box of disorganized files in the courthouse basement. The author, Milli Knudsen, was experienced at handling old, brittle documents; she wound up training a cadre of interested people, with whom she began burrowing into local history. Their triumph - which is of invaluable service to professional and amateur genealogists, historians and social scientists - would not be possible but for a remarkable set of circumstances. The Keene court has the distinction of being the only one in the state that has never been flooded or damaged by fire; its files remained untouched by disaster. Also, unlike the situation in some other counties, the records here have always been in protective custody; you won’t find any of them being peddled at flea markets or on the Internet. And the acid-free containers that hold some of the papers would not be in use but for a modest grant from the state’s moose license plate program. Finally, Knudsen arrived in Keene to find a supportive court clerk, Barbara Hogan, an enthusiastic historical society and a group of energetic members of the Daughters of the American Revolution - Verne Greene, Marilyn Holmquist, Marjory Richards and Jo-Anne Cobban - who were ready to practically live in the courthouse basement for two years. But this is not the end of the story - or shouldn’t be. Countless court papers are still neatly organized in ordinary cardboard boxes, not acid-free containers. And none of the court files are on microfilm, aside from some probate records up to 1885 that Mormon genealogists previously handled. Finally, the records from the first half of the 20th century remain unorganized. If New Hampshire values its written record as an important reference to the early American experience, it will find a way to protect all these court records and make them more widely available. New Hampshire need not go as whole hog as, say, the state of Virginia, which half a dozen years ago hired more than 20 archivists to process that state’s historic public records. But, when and if it ever emerges from its self-induced condition of penury, the state ought to deploy a few more resources into properly storing and microfilming historic public records so that the Granite State’s heritage can be shared more widely.
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