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South Carolina Archives Miscellaneous Records (Main Series), 1732-1981CALL NUMBER: S 213003 CREATOR: Secretary of State. Recorded
Instruments. After the fall of the proprietary government in 1719 and the arrival of a provisional royal governor in 1721, Secretary of the Province Charles Hart began a new series of volumes with a Volume A. This Interregnum Series did not clearly separate different types of documents into separate volumes, but a more concerted effort in that direction began in 1732 when John Hammerton arrived in the province with a new commission as secretary under the now permanent royal government. Hammerton began another new series of volumes for his office designated with double letters (AA, BB, CC, etc.). Volume AA was used for land grants and has long been considered the beginning of a separate land grant series. This series therefore begins with Volume BB and continued in a letter-designated sequence until Volume 7M was completed in 1903. The designations skipped from 6M to 7L, and the last volumes in the series were designated simply by beginning date or single letters or numbers. SUMMARY SCOPE NOTE: As its name implies, this series contains a wide variety of legal instruments recorded by the Secretary of the Province and the Secretary of State. A rich source for social and economic history, the contents of the series change over time. In the colonial and antebellum period the series includes powers of attorney, bills of sale, mortgages, gifts in trust, conveyances in trust, bonds, manumissions, appointments of guardians, marriage settlements, naturalizations, appointments and revocations of appointments, proclamations of awards for apprehension of criminals, pardons, remissions of fines, arbitration awards, receipts, certificates, promissory notes, releases, and articles of copartnership. The first four volumes of the series, Volumes BB and AB (Mortgages, 1732-1735 and 1735-1736), Volume CC (Inventories, 1732-1736), and Volume DD (Commissions and Instructions, 1732-1742), are devoted to particular types of documents. Later mortgage and inventory volumes are classified as separate record series. In 1773 the secretary began to use separate volumes of printed forms for bills of sale, but these volumes continued to bear letter designations within the sequence of this series until 1843. Volumes designated 2Q, 3N, 3P, 3T, 3X, 4A, 4D, 4F, 4I, 4K, 4M, 4P, 4S, 4V, 4X, 5A, 5D, 5K, 5O, 5T, and 5W in this series contain these bills of sale, principally bills of sale for slaves. These volumes also include some sales of businesses, ships and boats, and other items. After 1843 the bills of sale volumes are considered a separate record series. A more detailed description of their content can be found under that series. Beginning in 1836 separate volumes of printed forms were also begun for recording bonds for the payment of debts. These volumes are Volume 5S, 1836-1846, and Volume 6C, 1846-1872. Volume 6M, 1874- 1875, was used to record (in longhand) bonds of public officials. Volumes through Vol. 6K, 1860-1868, and an
irregularly designated "Miscellaneous and Other Records No.
1," 1862-1863, were recorded in the Charleston Office of the
Secretary and consist primarily of documents from Charleston and the
low country. Later volumes were recorded in Columbia and include patents
for forfeited land, marriage settlements, bonds, deeds of trust,
petitions for change of name, liens and mortgages, memoranda of
agreement, declarations and petitions for incorporation, boundary
changes between counties, interstate compacts, and mid twentieth-century
certificates for hiring foreign nationals. A two-volume twentieth-century grantor index to volumes 2P, 2Q, 2S, 2U, 2X, and 2W (arranged volume-by-volume); a one-volume grantor index to volumes 3A-4Z, 1791-1825; and a one-volume grantor index to the 6-letter volumes, 1846-1868, are also in the repository and also all have document descriptions. The index to the 6-letter volumes also indexes volumes R-2C of the Miscellaneous Records (Columbia Series). These indexes have been reproduced on microfilm by the Genealogical Society of Utah. The one-volume index to the 5-letter series has also been filmed by the Genealogical Society. Volumes from the 1740s through the early 1750s and the volumes containing Bills of Sale, 1773-1843, are indexed in detail in the repository's On-line Consolidated Index to Multiple Record Series, 1675-1929. All names of parties to transactions and slave names were indexed. The topical terms "blacks, free" and "mulattoes" were used when persons were so identified. The term "slaves, skilled" was entered when such skills were mentioned, and "estate dispositions" was used for transactions involving estates. Names of boats and ships, hotels, theaters, and the like are indexed as topics, and topical terms like "indian trade," "livestock sales," "privateering," "slave manumissions," "marriage settlements," "indentured servants," "stock in trade," "grocery stores," "household goods," "bars and taverns," "tobacco shops," and "restaurants" were also used. Street names where businesses were located were indexed as geographic locations. Plantation and barony names were indexed as topics, not as geographic locations. Names of witnesses were not indexed. The index terms from the Bills of Sale volumes are also in a three-reel computer output microfilm (COM) index produced by the repository in 1980 that also includes the bills of sale in the separate successor Bills of Sale series. They are also in the Combined Alphabetical Index produced by the repository on computer output microfilm in 1991. The numeric code 0002 001 was used to designate this series in the computer output microfilm indexes. Indexes to commissions of public officers
extracted from the general index to volumes 2E through 5A, 1732-1825,
are also available in the repository. Marriage settlements and other
references to marriages in this series are indexed in Barbara R.
Langdon, South Carolina Marriages... Implied in..., Vols. III, VI, and
VII (Aiken, S.C..: Langdon and Langdon Genealogical Research,
1993-1999). Most volumes have internal indexes. Volumes CC, FF through LL, NN, OO, and RR were
transcribed by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.
These transcripts and Genealogical Society of Utah microfilm of most of
them are in the series Miscellaneous Records (WPA Typescripts), 1692 -
1779. |