"Duely & Constantly Kept" (Click Here to view entire document in PDF format) |
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Preface
The New York State Archives and Records Administration (SARA), a unit of the Office of Cultural Education in the State Education Department, regulates the disposal and selective preservation of State and local government records, provides guidance and services to help governments better manage their records, and promotes and supports public and private historical records programs statewide. One of SARA's specific legal responsibilities is to identify, acquire, preserve, and make available for research the archival records of the three branches
of State government. Archival records are those that have enduring administrative, legal, historical, or other research value. Since 1978, SARA has operated a storage and research facility and administered professional archival programs to support this mission. As of January 1990, the State Archives' collections comprised nearly 45,000 cubic feet of records, or more than 100 million documents, with additional records acquired every month. The records cover the period from seventeenth century Dutch colonial settlement to the l98Os, and include parchments, standard paper files, oversize maps and drawings, photographs, sound recordings, films, videotapes, microforms, and computer tapes. Located in the Cultural Education Center in Albany's Empire State Plaza, the State Archives is open to the public Monday through Friday, except State holidays, from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.
The State Archives' first major acquisition of judicial records occurred in 1982, when the New York State Court of Appeals transferred nearly 3,000 cubic feet of pre-l847 court records. |
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Supreme Court Writs and Judgment Rolls. This photograph shows (left) examples of parchment judgment rolls and writs filed with the clerk of the Supreme Court of Judicature at Albany, and (right) writs of error filed at Utica, after archival processing. |
| This transfer included records of the Supreme Court of Judicature, the Court of Chancery, the Court of Probates, and the Court for the Correction of Errors, all of which were abolished as part of a reorganization of the judiciary carried out pursuant to the third State Constitution of 1846. An 1847 law required that records from the four defunct courts, except records from the New York City office of the Supreme Court of Judicature, be transferred to the State's newly established highest court, the Court of Appeals.
Court of Appeals Clerks supervised the protection of these pre-l847 records for 135 years. From 1973 to 1982, because of space limitations in Court of Appeals Hall, the records were stored at the Historical Documents Collection at Queens College of the City University of New York. When the judges of the court ordered the records deposited in the State Archives, staff of the court, the college, and the State Archives worked together to transport the records to Albany. Archives staff then began the laborious process of putting in order hundreds of volumes and thousands of bundles of documents; assessing preservation needs and beginning treatment; and preparing finding aids so that researchers can make better use of the rich source material for understanding and interpreting the State's history. Publication of this volume represents a significant milestone in this work. This history and inventory were written by one person, but the work would have been impossible without a cooperative effort by State Archives staff. Several colleagues participated in the project, during the summer of 1982, to move the records back to Albany and to prepare an initial list of all the records. Immediately after the move, Alan S. Kowlowitz and Henry Bell were primarily responsible for unpacking, arranging, and shelving the great mass of records. Subsequently, many Archives staff have contributed to the ongoing work as resources allow and priorities dictate to further arrange, describe, catalog, and preserve these records and to advise and assist researchers in using them. Bernice Waidman, Justine Bouchey, and Amy Shear patiently word-processed the several drafts of this work. Thomas E. Mills and Alan S. Kowlowitz read and commented on the work at several stages. In addition, the section on the history of the Supreme Court of Judicature benefited from comments made by Dr. Paul Finkelman of Brooklyn Law School. The late Dr. Bernard S. McLane of Dartmouth College provided advice on the history of the common law. Bruce Abrams of the New York County Clerk's Office furnished data on Supreme Court records in that repository. The author remains responsible for the factual content of this publication.  Archivist III New York State Archives and Records Administration |
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 The Historical Society of the Courts of the State of New York | |
