"rubyslippers" wants to know: how does one obtain estate records after 1774? The Prerogative Court system was abolished with the beginning of the Revolutionary War. After that, wills, inventories, accounts and settlements were filed in and handled by the individual County Courts of Quarter Sessions (or of Common Pleas). In addition, Orphans Courts were established in Maryland Counties beginning in 1776. These typically handled some matters previously handled by the Church of England Vestry (such as binding out orphans) and many land partition and distribution matters. Locating these records for specific Counties can be a problem, since the MD Archives has gone around seizing various documents from most Courthouses. Many but not all Counties retained microfilms of the records, or kept originals from (varying) specific dates. The current administration of the Archives believes in hiding information on its holdings beneath layers and layers of nearly unintelligible pages, and usually the search engines will give you articles *about* documents rather than results about the actual documents (holdings and locations). So your best bet is to call the County Courthouse and speak to the County Clerk's office staff, who can tell you pretty much what is where. Some contact information can be found here for MD Counties (scroll down to the bottom and pick your County of interest), but these pages are not entirely accurate and up-to-date about specific County holdings (as distinguished from the MD Archives holdings). Try to avoid clicking on the many commercial-site search links. http://www.mymarylandgenealogy.com/index.htm Good hunting, Judy .</HTML>

Judy thank you SO much for explaining in detail the situation. I very much appreciate this help. I have friends who don't understand where the challenge is in finding dead people - after all they say they aren't going anywhere. If they only knew -----Original Message----- From: mdstmary-bounces@rootsweb.com [mailto:mdstmary-bounces@rootsweb.com] On Behalf Of Frostfreedet@aol.com Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2009 9:45 PM To: mdstmary@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: [MDSTMARY] Court Records (MD estate records after 1774) "rubyslippers" wants to know: how does one obtain estate records after 1774? The Prerogative Court system was abolished with the beginning of the Revolutionary War. After that, wills, inventories, accounts and settlements were filed in and handled by the individual County Courts of Quarter Sessions (or of Common Pleas). In addition, Orphans Courts were established in Maryland Counties beginning in 1776. These typically handled some matters previously handled by the Church of England Vestry (such as binding out orphans) and many land partition and distribution matters. Locating these records for specific Counties can be a problem, since the MD Archives has gone around seizing various documents from most Courthouses. Many but not all Counties retained microfilms of the records, or kept originals from (varying) specific dates. The current administration of the Archives believes in hiding information on its holdings beneath layers and layers of nearly unintelligible pages, and usually the search engines will give you articles *about* documents rather than results about the actual documents (holdings and locations). So your best bet is to call the County Courthouse and speak to the County Clerk's office staff, who can tell you pretty much what is where. Some contact information can be found here for MD Counties (scroll down to the bottom and pick your County of interest), but these pages are not entirely accurate and up-to-date about specific County holdings (as distinguished from the MD Archives holdings). Try to avoid clicking on the many commercial-site search links. http://www.mymarylandgenealogy.com/index.htm Good hunting, Judy .</HTML> ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to MDSTMARY-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message