We begin 2025 by highlighting the work of our newest student intern.
See our previous profiles here:
Educational background:
What drew you to volunteer/seek an internship with the Uncovering New Haven project and/or the Connecticut State Archives?
I knew when I was preparing to start my master’s program that I wanted to do some kind of work experience as part of it. I’d volunteered at the University of Hartford’s archives in the past, and the archivist there had mentioned that he’d interned at the State Archives earlier in his career. It seemed like a pretty valuable experience to me. Plus it’s a different workplace than what I’d experienced previously, and I thought it would be important to be familiar with multiple different kinds of archives before starting my career. I already knew I wanted to intern at the State Archives, but as soon as Uncovering New Haven was brought up as a potential project for me to work on, I was sure that it was what I wanted to do. Having gotten my bachelor’s degree in history, I’m particularly interested in primary sources and the stories that they can tell, and court documents can tell you a lot about the people involved and the societies they lived in.
Describe a normal day in the archives for you:
I showed up at 10 o’clock, because I’m not a morning person. The first thing I do is usually review my workspace to check where I had left off from the previous day—most of the time I try to leave things off at a fairly natural point so I’m not in the middle of any particular documents, but it can still be useful to remind myself of some of the previous cases. After that I work my way through the bundles of documents, unfolding and flattening each one out with a bone folder, then reading through each one to determine the basic information about the case (plaintiff, defendant, date) to write on a paper slip that the documents go into. I also make sure to mark any cases that include BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) individuals or other interesting people or subjects. There are many specific individuals or topics that are listed as being of interest for digitization, but I also mark down any cases that are unique or intriguing—in hindsight, I think a few of the ones I marked early on weren’t as interesting, but I got better at picking out the more interesting cases over time.
What is the most interesting, memorable, surprising, and/or bizarre thing(s) you’ve found while processing the court records?
I found a decent amount of the more interesting, dramatic, or strange things in the Superior Court criminal files. There were more cases of illegal liquor sales, which was apparently unique compared to other time periods. A few of the violent cases were a bit grisly. But some were just strange—there was one charge for attempted murder that involved someone hitting another person over the head with a chamber pot. I also noticed that there were a few different scenarios where cases (especially perjury cases) were related to each other, which were often easy to find because the files were sorted alphabetically by the surname of the defendant, and related cases were often bundled together. This often made it easier to follow the entire story of the trial. One such case involved a person who escaped jail and was tried for it, but was then tried a second time for perjury because they had hidden the fact that they had an accomplice in their testimony.
At first, when I got to working on civil court records, many of the cases weren’t as interesting to me as the criminal trials—there were a decent number of cases over land ownership or unpaid debts that didn’t seem to have very much personality to them, so to speak. But over time, I found that the nature of civil cases would sometimes allow for a further glimpse into people’s lives at the time. For example, there were two different lawsuits from individuals who claimed that they had been hired by someone to work on the crew of a ship making a voyage to the Caribbean and back from New York but had been fired halfway through and left in Havana. Another case involved a man who left a significant amount of money in a burlap sack in a barn on public property, who then attempted to sue to get it back when the money was taken, because he had been unable to successfully file any sort of criminal charges. There was also a Yale student who was accused of going to Georgia and using a fake name to buy goods, promising to pay later, and then never getting back to the people he bought from. The lawsuit never specifies what he bought, but the plaintiffs do take care to mention that he misrepresented his age to them, which makes me think it could have been alcohol.
None of these cases seem to be of major historical significance—I came across a few that had notable names but weren’t as interesting—but they were all significant in these people’s individual lives, and they paint an interesting picture of life in Connecticut and America at the time.
What aspects of working on this project did you enjoy the most, and why? What aspects did you enjoy the least, and why?
As you can probably see from some of my previous answers, I really enjoyed having the chance to look into the individual stories covered in each of the documents. At times, it felt like a glimpse into daily life from the 18th and 19th centuries. I also enjoyed the challenge of working with older handwriting. This was something that I hadn’t had much experience with, since I’d mostly worked with more recent documents, many of which had been typed. It was interesting to see the handwriting quirks or turns of phrase that ended up going out of use, such as the long S. Reading this handwriting and figuring out some of the outdated language, as much as I enjoyed the experience, did also prove to be frustrating at times, especially when I was struggling to figure out what the person was being charged with. It took a while to get used to all of the procedural language as well. At times it felt like solving a puzzle, which made it interesting, but at other times it could seem impenetrable. I think a lot of this was dependent on the person who wrote the document originally, because some people had beautiful, legible handwriting, and others not so much.
What have you learned about court records, history, or in general over the course of working on the Uncovering New Haven project?
I feel like I’ve learned a lot more about the way the English language was used at the time. Of course, this is only in a legal context, but it was interesting to see what things survived to the current day and what didn’t. The documents also had a lot of little procedural quirks in the language—this still exists in modern court records, from what I can tell, but it felt like it was to a different degree in the records I worked with. There were lots of phrases which were repeated as a formality, such as noting what city and county a plaintiff or defendant was from every time they were mentioned, or always using the phrase “with intent to” before listing three to five verbs that would apply to things like assault or theft. Aspects of this definitely seem to have persisted, but the combination of the repetition of these phrases along with some of the abbreviations that were used for names and the individual differences in handwriting were all new to me.
I also feel like working on this project has underlined just what it is about archives that interests me—the day-to-day preservation of materials along with the active role in preserving history and assisting with historical research. I think the papers that are a part of this collection can prove how procedural documents that might not use an individual’s voice can still prove to be a rich source of information about trends, lives, and attitudes throughout history both in the stories they tell and the ways they were written. This was something that I felt before starting this internship, but this experience has helped me to reflect on that and be able to express that more clearly.
Is there anything else that you would like to share about your volunteer/internship experience?
I just want to thank everyone working at the archives who provided me with this opportunity, supervised me, gave advice, and helped with the work. This was a valuable experience at this early point of my career, for my own education as a grad student and my familiarity with the archives field in general. I also enjoyed getting to meet my fellow interns and volunteers.
This project is made possible through funding from the Historic Documents Preservation fund of the Office of the Public Records Administrator. We also recognize the past support of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).
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