A Family History Mission: An Interesting Discovery

No. 26

Note: You can do a Google search for "A Family History Mission" to see all the previous posts in this ongoing series. You can also search for "James Tanner genealogy" and find them.

One of our main activities at the Maryland State Archives is preparing old documents for digitization. These documents have not been opened for almost 200 years and except for those who put them in boxes, have not been touched for almost that long. Every document is an individual discovery.

While opening and preparing the documents recently, Ann made this discovery. The document shown above is an original conservatorship file signed by John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States, while he was serving as the Secretary of State of the United States. Here are some additional photos of the document. You can click on the documents to see enlarged copies.

This is a close up of the seal on the document.

This is the heading and a closer look at the insignia.

This is the cover sheet, as an actual piece of paper that is wrapped around the filed document. The courts today still require a cover sheet, but it no longer wraps around the document, it is more like a title page to the document.

Here is a closer view of the signature page. You can see the documents have acquired a permanent fold and must be unfolded and made as flat as possible for digitization. The documents are digitized under a piece of glass which holds them flatter than they would be otherwise.

We keep finding very interesting documents.