Record
of the Month!
On April
19, 1775, hostilities between the Empire of Great Britain and the American
Colonies opened with the battles of Lexington and Concord. The hostilities were
the result of the repeated tyrannical actions taken by the British Crown and
Parliament in a bid to impose harsher colonial rule over the American colonies.
Just over a year after hostilities had been opened, on July 4, 1776, the colonies
formally articulated and declared their independence with the adoption of the Declaration
of Independence, immortalizing that date as the official birthday of the United
States.
For the
month of July, we are featuring a few different records that also share July as
their birthday month.
The first
and oldest record displayed here is dated July 1, 1810, and is a filing record
from the Supreme Court of Ohio, which is held in the Licking County Records
& Archives Center. The record itself describes the Licking County Clerk of
Courts filing a transcript with the Clerk of the Supreme Court of Ohio from
February of 1810, involving an Alex Holmes as the complainant (or plaintiff),
and James Johnston and Noah Lindsay as the defendants. The
1802 Constitution of Ohio established the Supreme Court of Ohio, made up of
three judges appointed by the Ohio General Assembly, which was a major change
from the previous judicial territory system. The Ohio Supreme Court was
required to hold session “once a year in each county,” this practice was
referred to as “riding the circuits.”
The second
record on display here is dated July 7, 1838, and is an entry from the Harrison
Township Estray Record. Estray records were registers where a person could give
public notice of valuable animals, either lost or found wandering (presumed
escaped from their owners), allowing the owners to reclaim the animal. In this
record Erastus Allen reported finding a mare wandering on his property around
June 19, 1838. The Justice of the Peace for Harrison Township appraised the
mare to be worth $30 (approximately $868.37 today), and estimated that she was
about 4 years old and about fourteen hands high.
The final
record displayed here is a Bill of Exception (case no. 1299) filed in the Court
of Appeal (Circuit Court) on July 6, 1914. The case was between the City of
Newark (plaintiff) and Harriet B Crane et. al. (defendants). Bills of Exception
were part of the appeals process by which one of the parties on the case would
formally “take exception” to the Judge’s interpretation of the law, usually in
relation to rulings on the admissibility or inadmissibility of evidence in a
jury trial. Though Bills of Exception were filed separately from the appeals
petition, similar to the petition they would outline the party’s grievances
and/or evidence of an error on the part of the finder of fact. Over time Bills
of Exception were commonly used to get certain evidence on record and included
in the Court’s officially recorded copy of the case. Often the evidence took
the form of affidavits that were not ordinarily included in the official “record”
of the case (in the state of Ohio, the official record generally only includes
motions and orders filed, and judgements-these records would include a summary
of the evidence, but rarely the evidence itself). Due to the redundant nature
of the Bills of Exception, they were done away with in 1987, when the rules of
evidence in the Ohio Revised Code were changed. The Bill of Exception displayed
here is 261 pages long and contains a list of the trial exhibits, case
stipulations, and transcripts of the testimony and evidence given during the
original trial. The original trial concerns the ownership and use of land as a
graveyard.
If this information interests you, please feel free to
contact us by phone at 740-670-5121 or email archives@lcounty.com. Also
for more information about these records, please check out the Bibliography Page.
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