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Scope and Content:

The Survey of County records series, comprising 15 linear feet of material, is arranged alphabetically by county. record types inventoried for each county may include some or all of the following: Correspondence; Historical Material; Historical Material - Government Organization; Inventory of Government Department Holdings; Housing, Care, and Accessibility of Records (which deals with storage and arrangement); Maps (of the counties); and Inventory of Maps in the Counties. The records reflect the fact that the field workers fully researched some counties while paying scant attention to others.

Correspondence between field workers in the counties and their supervisors in district offices or the state H.R.S. office contains descriptive and historical information about the counties as well as information concerning the workings of the H.R.S. project. In some areas the work went along quite smoothly, but in others the field workers faced numerous difficulties: getting permission to examine government records and to have a place to work, facing officials whose attitude ranged from indifference to outright hostility; attempting to inventory records which were poorly organized and stored in inaccessible places; and even obtaining adequate training and basic office supplies from the WPA Charles Johnson, a field worker in Ionia County, wrote articulately on the workings of the project and his letters make good reading (see roll 13). Three counties - Alger, Ingham, and Marquette - had H.R.S. district supervisors' offices, so their correspondence files contain information about whole regions as well as good descriptions of the project (letters which mentioned only one county have been transferred to that county's files). H.R.S. correspondence is also a source of information about county records. Sometimes it reveals what had happened to records which no longer existed when the survey was conducted and sometimes it is a source of inventory information - in the case of Ingham County the only source, since both the forms and the completed inventory (if there ever was one) are lost. Within each county, correspondence is arranged chronologically and anything of a routine or insignificant nature has been discarded. General instructions, issued to each field worker in the state, have not been retained for each county but only where they were first found in processing and so would tend to be concentrated at the beginning of the alphabetical listing of counties. Any researcher studying the H.R.S. project would want to consult all of the correspondence; therefore, in addition to each county's correspondence being microfilmed with its other material, all the correspondence has been preserved after filming and grouped together, arranged alphabetically by county.

Historical information is divided into two broad categories: Historical Material for general information and Historical Material - Government Organization (what the H.R.S. called "legal research") for that relating to the government departments. For both, like information has been gathered together and arranged, for the most part, according to the organizational scheme in the H.R.S. published guides.

For Historical Materials, broad-ranging essays or compilations of information are filed first, followed by specific topics: location, derivation of name, geography and geology, Indian occupation, French penetration, English succession, American emergence, the Territory of Michigan, creation of the county (including copies of early deeds and mortgages), the county seat of justice, first (and usually subsequent) county officers, politics, the circuit court, the courthouse(s) and other early county buildings, the townships, agriculture, the chief city or cities, prominent citizens, business and industry, education, arts, religion, population (including ethnic breakdowns as well as total numbers), special historic and scenic features, transportation (including routes as well as modes), and journalism. Sometimes, previously written guides or parts thereof were used as the basis for new ones, with revisions for the new guide made on a copy of the old one (e.g., Kalamazoo from Alger, Kent from Alger and Calhoun, and others).

Discarded from the historical materials were: masses of duplicates, including such things as notes that were written up into essays (if the collection contains the essays), rough drafts of published essays (the most advanced draft of an essay was retained if it had not been published, and if duplicates had conflicting or overlapping information, all were saved), and carbon copies; library notes from published works which the Bentley Library has in its collection or which are readily obtained elsewhere, e.g., county histories, censuses, directories, atlases, laws, to name just a few (although if it was too time-consuming to locate the source or if the notes were extremely clear, these notes were retained); information that was irrelevant; and illegible notes.

Government information was organized by the H.R.S. in two ways: in "legal research" files and in inventories of records held by the various government departments. Survey staff compiled the former in order to write the history of the government organization for each county and to show the workings of each government department. In the current arrangement of the collection, this type of information is called Historical Material - Government Organization. Luther Evans said to a U.S. Senate subcommittee, "It is necessary, if the reader is to understand the relation of each record to the government of the community and to other records, that he have a brief statement of the history, the organization, duties and function of each office of local government, and that he know what legal requirements exist for the keeping of records." The historical material on the government organization is filed separately from the inventory forms (as, indeed, the H.R.S. workers handled it, until it was brought together to produce a published guide), but both obviously cover the same departments: Board of Supervisors, County Clerk, Register of Deeds, Superintendent of Abstracts/Abstract Department, Circuit Court, Circuit Court Commissioners, Friend of the Court, Jury Commission, Probation Officer, Probate Court, Probate Judge's Office, Juvenile Probation Officer, Sheriff, Concealed Weapon Licensing Board, Coroner, Prosecuting Attorney, Tax Allocation Board/Bureau of Taxation, County Treasurer, Controller, County Auditors, Sinking Fund, School Commissioner, Board of School Examiners, County Health Department/Board of Health, County Nurse, Superintendents of the Poor/Poor Commission, County Welfare Agent, Social Welfare Board/Department of Social Welfare/Bureau of Social Aid, Soldiers' Relief Commission, Board of Election Commissioners, Board of Canvassers, Road Commission, Drain Commissioner, County Plat Board, Surveyor, Board of Park Trustees/Parks Department, Sealer of Weights and Measures, Agricultural Agent, Humane Office, Dog Warden, and Game Warden. (n.b., no county had all of these departments, and sometimes there was historical information on a department but no inventory, or vice versa.)

Inventories of Government Department Holdings were recorded on Volume and Unbound Record Forms (12-13HR). These provide a wealth of information about the records: the title of the record series, inclusive dates, location and storage conditions, labeling, quantity, contents, arrangement and indexing, physical description of volumes, and more. Field workers would fill out one form for each type of record found and send the forms to the central editorial board in Detroit, where archivists and historians directed the editing. In reviewing these forms, the editors frequently had questions or wanted more information. They wrote their questions and comments on "rejection slips", which they then attached to the forms in question and returned to the workers for correction or completion. For accuracy, everything was rechecked. Usually, new information was added to the original forms, making the rejection slips redundant. These slips have been discarded. But if the information was written on the rejection slip instead of the form, both have been saved. Along with superfluous rejection slips, other unneeded items have been discarded as well: blank forms, superseded forms, and duplicates. Sometimes two or even three workers conducted their own separate inventories of the same records and in these cases the most complete form has been saved for each record. When a typed form accompanied a handwritten one, the most legible one has been retained, usually the typed one. There is undoubtedly some duplication still, for sometimes copies of the same records were found in more than one department and were inventoried in both places (for example, numerous departments would file copies of certain records with the county clerk's office and still retain their originals).

Both in the original survey and in its current form, arrangement was done at the folder level, with (in most cases) each government department having its own folder. The Survey workers assembled the forms for each department but usually did not put them in any particular order (that would come later, when it was time to publish the inventory). This original order has been retained. If there were very few inventory forms for a given county, they have all been placed in one folder and their departments not itemized in the contents list beyond the "Inventory of Government Department Holdings" listing.

Housing, Care, and Accessibility of Records (or H.C.A.) was the heading the H.R.S. gave to their description if the storage and arrangement of records. It deals with the way the workers found the records or, if they were conscientious and industrious, the way they themselves organized them if the county officials gave them permission to improve their arrangement. Here the inventory was done by building and by room within a building, using Form 10HR, which was either the County Building Form or the Office or Vault Form. The County Building Form gives the address and location of the building, describes its physical attributes, and tells some of its history. The Office or Vault Form lists the government department to which the records belong; the location of the room within the building; storage conditions such as overcrowding, lighting, ventilation, and fire safety; and the quantity of bound and unbound records. Sometimes the County Building Form contains very detailed information about the buildings where the records were stored, both physical and historical, accompanied by diagrams of floor plans and building facades. An extreme example of this is Saginaw County, where even the fixtures in the bathrooms were described. Usually there was not much duplication, but if the information on the forms had been written into an essay, either published or unpublished, the forms have been discarded. Oversized floor plans and architectural drawings were not microfilmed and are filed alphabetically by county. Smaller ones have been retained in addition to being filmed and are interfiled with the others. Photographs of courthouses and some other early buildings have also been preserved. Researchers interested in the history or architecture of such buildings should consult these folders, the courthouse section of the Historical Material files, and the H.C.A. files. The transcripts of Board of Supervisors' minutes are another source of information on county buildings.

There are two files dealing with maps. The first, Maps, consists of maps of the counties drawn by H.R.S. workers on letter-size paper in preparation for publication in the guide for each county. Oftentimes there is a map of Michigan with the given county highlighted to show its location, followed by several maps of that county in varying levels of detail, drawn with some care, frequently in color. The best representative sample of each has been retained, with all duplicates discarded. After filming, these maps have been preserved and grouped together, arranged alphabetically by county. In addition, there are a few maps, too large to microfilm or not really related to the H.R.S., which have been removed to the Bentley Library's map collection.

The second file, Inventory of Maps in the County describes the maps that H.R.S. workers found in the counties. They used Form 15HR, the Maps and Photographs Form, to describe each map in some detail, noting features such as date, size, title or subject, area covered, scale, type of map, artist or author, publisher, place of publication, physical condition, location, and the name of the government department to which it belonged. H.R.S. workers inventoried an unusually large number of maps in Houghton and Keweenaw Counties.

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