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Consolidated index to all nine volumes of
Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts
of Essex County, Massachusetts
(Salem, 1911-1975)

version 1.1 (December 2021)

By Ian Watson

------------------------
Rightsholder Information
------------------------

The nine volumes of the "Records and Files" were published by the Essex Institute at Salem, Massachusetts, from 1911 to 1975. The first eight volumes were published from 1911 to 1921 and are now no longer in copyright. The ninth volume, with financial support from John B. Threlfall, was published in 1975, and its copyright is still in effect. The copyright now resides with the Essex Institute's successor, the Peabody Essex Museum (pem.org).

In about 2000, the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project at the University of Virginia manually keyed the indexes to all nine volumes into HTML files. The resulting index pages were made publicly available and remain so (salem.lib.virginia.edu, under "Court Records," then "Records and Files"). This work is copyright by Benjamin Ray and the University of Virginia.

In 2018-2020, inspired by his work for the Great Migration Study Project, Ian Watson took the HTML files from the University of Virginia website and transformed the data within them into a more tractable format. He then cleaned up many, many typographical and formatting errors in the data, and combined the indexes from all nine volumes into a single index. This produced the files that you have now.

The three creators of this data file have agreed to release it here under a Creative Commons By-Attribution Share-Alike License. The full terms of the license are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0. 

As well, any further redistributions must include this file. 

Specifically, the license requires that:

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. 


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About the "Records and Files"
-----------------------------

The nine published volumes cover court sessions from 1636 to 1686. These court sessions did not all take place in Essex County. They also took place in "old" Norfolk County, Massachusetts, which existed until 1679. "Old" Norfolk County included the area between the Merrimack River and the New Hampshire border in what is now Massachusetts, and the coastal sections of what is now New Hampshire.

The published volumes do not exhaust the available documentary records, which extend past 1686. 

These documents are basically divided into "records" (bound volumes with brief information on each session and the cases heard at it) and "files" (loose papers from each case, such as depositions).

Images of some of the original record books are available at FamilySearch (familysearch.org) under the following catalog numbers:

https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/40003
https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/37465
https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/39961

The loose papers (the "files") are not available from FamilySearch. 

The originals of the record books currently reside, on deposit, at the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. They are owned, however, by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Archives in Boston, which also has custody of the files. 

The nine volumes are not the only transcriptions of the original documents. 57 typescript volumes of verbatim transcriptions of Essex County court documents from 1636 to 1694 were created in the late 1930s as a WPA project, and these can be consulted on paper at the Peabody Essex Museum's library in Rowley, Massachusetts, or on microfilm at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Archives in Boston.

An index to these verbatim transcriptions is available, and was filmed by FamilySearch. It can be found under the "Court papers index, 1636-1694" heading at this catalog record:

https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/40003

Unlike the 57 typescript volumes, the nine published volumes are not by any means verbatim transcriptions of the records. They should be thought of as detailed abstracts that preserve much of the original language and sometimes approach the level of a transcription. In condensing, they inevitably leave out some fine details, and we have also noticed that the published volumes sometimes omit sensitive or prurient aspects of the court cases.


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About the index
----------------------------

There are generally two kinds of entries in the index: personal names and subjects. These are intermixed, although ideally we would like to separate them.

As we have presented it, the nine indexes contain 17,318 headwords, 46,813 lines, and 150,162 references to individual pages or page ranges.

In this distribution, we have included the data in two different formats.

(1) The file "eqc-linkstogether.ods" contains the entire index, with headers, sorted by surname/headword, given name/subword, and volume, in a format which keeps all the page references from each line of each volume together. This format is quicker to read. 

(2) The file "eqc-linksapart.ods" contains the entire index, with headers, sorted by surname/headword, given name/subword, volume, and page, in a format where each page reference or range is split into a single line. This format is more convenient for automatic processing. In this file, single page references are coded with "s" and page ranges are coded with "r".

In these two files, the column headings and column contents are:

volume
------
The volume number.

linenumber
----------
A serial number for the line, starting with 1 for the first entry in volume 1 and ending with 46813 for the last entry in volume 9.

headwordnumber
--------------
A serial number for the headword, starting with 1 for the first entry in volume 1 and ending with 17318 for the last entry in volume 9.

headword
--------
A surname for personal name lines, or a subject for subject lines.

variant
-------
Variant forms of the surname. These are the variant forms given in the printed text and have not been modified or added to.

subword
-------
A given name for personal name lines, or a sub-subject for subject lines. Five dashes are used for an unknown given name.

see
---
The target of a "see" reference if there is one.

see also
--------
The target of a "see also" reference if there is one.

links
-----
The volume and page numbers of all references for the line.

singlepage-or-range
-------------------
Coded with an "s" for a single page reference, or an "r" for a range reference. For ranges only, the following two columns give two page values.

page
----
The page number of the reference for the line, or the starting page number of the range.

rangeend
--------
The ending page number of the range for the line.


-----------------------------------------
Shortcomings and their potential remedies
-----------------------------------------

The greatest shortcoming of the index in its current form is that each of the indexes in the nine volumes grouped variant forms of surnames a little differently. 

For example, volume 3 used the headword Abbie, with Abey as a stated variation. Volume 5 used the headword Abbe, with Abey and Abee as stated variations. 

These different sets of surname variations have NOT been standardized and gathered together into a single block. Rather, each set of variations is presented individually, each in its own alphabetical sequence. 

Thus, those searching for (for example) the surname Abbey and variations must look under Abbe, Abbey, Abbie, and Abby to carry out a complete search.

As well, the nine volumes rendered subject headings slightly differently, and these have not been grouped either.

I have sketched out an algorithm that would gather and group the varying surname forms together. But I have not attempted to code and run the algorithm, as it requires more time than I can currently devote. Also, a certain amount of manual grouping would be unavoidable, as it isn't completely possible to do away with human intelligence in deciding which headings are variants of another. Anyone who would like to work on this project is welcome to do so.

It would be fairly easy to generate volume and page numbers as "hot" links, i.e., clickable links which would allow users to call up the relevant page, or even all pages referenced on a single line, with one click. The Virginia web site, or the versions of the printed books at HathiTrust or the Internet Archive could be used as link targets. Adding this function could be very helpful to users.  

I can imagine many other minor and major improvements that would make the data more accessible.

Happy researching to everyone using this database!

---- Ian Watson
www.ianwatson.org


-----------------------------------------
Version information
-----------------------------------------

Version 1.0, February 2020

Version 1.1, December 2021: Minor adjustments. Raw data file and bash scripts no longer included in the distribution. (The raw data can be regenerated from the .ods files.)

