CALL NUMBER:        S 145002

CREATOR: Court of General Sessions.

TITLE: Criminal journals

DATE: 1769-1776

VOLUME: 1.00 volume

ARRANGEMENT: Series arranged chronologically.

SUMMARY SCOPE NOTE: This series is the day-to-day record of criminal proceedings in the South Carolina Court of General Sessions. Information generally includes the date and place of meeting; names of judges, jurors, defendants, and attorneys; summary of the case; cause of action; and disposition or verdict. This volume is the only criminal journal to survive from South Carolina's colonial period.

INDEX/FINDING AID: The names of the presiding judges, attorneys, the accused, and the accusers; the subjects taken up by the grand juries in their presentments; and the crimes committed have been indexed in the repository's On-line Index to this Criminal Court Journal, 1769-1776. The repository also produced a one-reel computer output microfilm (COM) index from this data in 1991. This COM index is included in the repository's Microcopy No. 14, which also is accompanied by a printed pamphlet. The pamphlet provides a more detailed description of this series and how it was indexed.

ADDITIONAL FORM: Entire series published as the repository's Microcopy No. 14, South Carolina Court of General Sessions, 1769-1776.

ASSOCIATED MATERIAL: Only six loose papers from this court survive in the repository's holdings, but records of a few much earlier criminal cases can be found in the scattered surviving proprietary era Council Journals, 1671-1680, 1692. Later in the colonial period, grand jury presentments were sometimes printed in the newspapers. In colonial and early state South Carolina, lists of persons eligible for jury duty were established by legislative act. These lists have been published in Mary Bondurant Warren, editor, South Carolina Jury Lists, 1718 through 1783 (Danielsville, Ga.: Heritage Papers, 1977) and Ge Lee Corley Hendrix and Morn McKoy Lindsay, editors, The Jury Lists of South Carolina, 1778-1779 (Greenville, S.C.: Privately Published, 1975).

HIERARCHICAL NOTE: Forms part of the records of the South Carolina Court of General Sessions.