For this discussion, for the sake of simplicity, I will only be talking about records in Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the beginning, a “General Court” was established in Boston for the entire colony. These colony records have long been published in Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 1628–1686, 5 vols. in 6 (Boston, 1853).
Massachusetts Bay Colony, however, grew so fast that the legislature was obliged to begin establishing court locations away from Boston, such as Salem, to save travel expenses and hardship for citizens of outlying towns. That soon also proved inadequate, and in 1643 Massachusetts Bay Colony established four county jurisdictions: Suffolk, Middlesex, Essex, and “Old Norfolk.” The latter has nothing to do with the Norfolk County we know today. It included some towns in the north of what later became Essex County, and some towns in southern New Hampshire, all of which were eventually absorbed into either Essex or New Hampshire county courts. We are not going to talk about “Old Norfolk Country” in this discussion, but I direct you to Wikipedia.
Each of the jurisdictions had two basic types of “Inferior” courts. These were the Courts of General Sessions and Courts of Common Pleas, which had full authority in civil and criminal cases “except for divorce and crimes involving life, limb or banishment,” which were still handled by the General Court in Boston. Each jurisdiction assigned magistrates who lived in the respective counties.
“General Sessions” dealt with criminal activity, prosecuting those who had broken the law. “Common Pleas” dealt with civil suits between individuals or groups, for such things as debt, trespass, or damages done by your hogs running wild in your neighbor’s corn field.
Those of you who have ancestors in Essex County are undoubtedly familiar with the lovely series Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, 1636–1686, 9 vols. (Salem, Mass.: 1897–1909). These are available in hard copy at many libraries, and digital versions of the books can be viewed and/or downloaded from such providers as www.archive.org and www.hathitrust.org. In addition, digital images of some of the earliest original records are also available here.
For those of you who have ancestors in Suffolk County, you may not be aware of a similar publication, although covering a much shorter period of time, in volumes 29 and 30 of the Collections of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts: Records of the Suffolk County Court, 1671–1680. Until recently these books have only been available in libraries, but the Colonial Society of Massachusetts has recently made available on their website OCR scans of all of their published works. Again, digital images of original Suffolk County records 1629-1797 are also available here.
Middlesex County, on the other hand, has never had any of its court records published, although “Middlesex County, Massachusetts, Abstracts of Court Records 1643-1674” compiled by Thomas Bellows Wyman sometime in the mid-nineteenth century, is among the NEHGS member databases; it presents short descriptions of the type of case and names of individuals that appear in the record files for that case, but no details. Otherwise, access to Middlesex county’s court records, even today, is limited to poorly-indexed, fuzzy and confusing digital images accessible here.
Next time, the Middlesex Muddle.
