A footnote to the discussion of the private sale of public records:

Officials in Virginia and other Southern states have had, and continue to
have, much experience with buying back public records, many of them going
back to the 1600s. I'm just writing an article on that very subject. Their
experince indicates that the answer to Mr.McGiver's question is that they
are definitely private property. because the Virginia Historical Society or
the Viriginia state archives have had to pay for them -- in some cases
through the nose -- when the buyers demanded it.

These were records stolen by Union soldiers during wanton looting of  county
courthouses during the Civil War.  A couple of months ago The Washington
Post carried a piece about records retrieved, via Ebay, by Prince William
County , VA, not far from Washington..

Charles City County's experience antedates Ebay. Beginning in 1901 and on a
dozen subsequent occasions through 1991, scores of records of that county
alone have trickled back from New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska,
New Jersey,  Ohio and Vermont..They were returned by descendants of Union
soldiers, by state or local historical societies to which they'd been
donated, and by a rare book dealer.

One batch was of 77 pages, from 1642 to 1842, and others were from 1677-79,
1681, 1685, 1687-95, 1692/93, and 1696  They were pilfered, apparently as
"souvenirs," when Union Gen. McClellan's III Army Corps stopped at  Charles
City during its retreat from Malvern Hill (or Harrison's Landing).

On the front page of one Charles City County "Executors Bond Book"  for
1813-14  is a penciled notation by a Union captain who had picked it up by
the roadside and returned it, along with his "protest against all
destruction of  like property and all wanton destruction of property
whatever." The county clerk wrote on the same page that the "Yankee soldiers
not only took (it) ... but they destroyed or carried away every book and
paper they found in the office."

An account of that looting was left by another Union soldier, Private Robert
Knox Sneden. In a diary of his war experiences on Aug 15, 1862, he wrote
that "the soldiers had forced an entrance into the court house and were
rummaging over the archives for relics, strewing parchment title deeds and
other law papers over the floors. They were [then] ejected by a guard and a
sentinel placed at the entrance to prevent further pillages ..."  Sneden's
diary and his watercolor sketches of military life came to light in 1994 and
are now in the Virginia Historical Society's collection. Many are included
in a remarkable book, "Images from the Storm," published in 2001 by The Free
Press.

The handwritten court orders that have been retrieved included wills,
records of lawsuits, deeds of bargain and sale, lease and release,
inventories of estates and wills. Many of them deal with families prominent
in Virginia and U. S. history including Randolphs, Byrds, Carters, Harrisons
and Tylers.

  "We still hope that people will keep an eye out for these kinds of
irreplaceable documents and return them to the Clerk's office," says Judy
Ledbetter, the Charles City County historian.She wonders how many similar
purloined records were simply destroyed, ended up in private collections,
are on a shelf in some auction house or used-book store, or are still packed
away, forgotten, in someone's attic.

A couple of weeks ago she told me that recently on Ebay she'd seen "a few
Hanover County (Va.) documents,"  bought them herself and given them to a
public repository..

                                                       William Ringle