June 3, 2011

The Archives of Michigan preserves Michigan government records that have enduring value. Among them are those that document Michigan's highest courts. Recently, the earliest of those records, dating from 1796 to 1857, were united with the Michigan Supreme Court records that date from 1858 to 2000.

In 1932, the Michigan Historical Commission temporarily transferred the early Michigan territorial and state Supreme Court records to University of Michigan Law School Professor William W. Blume. Legally acting as an agent of the commission, Blume had agreed to process the records and prepare them for publication. The following year, Blume also received records from Wayne County Circuit Court. These spanned 1796-1805 and documented pre-territorial cases of the Common Pleas and Quarter Sessions Courts. In 1941, records of the territorial court at Michilimackinac were also transferred to Blume. These three sets of records were classified, in archival terminology, as a single record group. In 1956, the Wayne County Circuit Court - acting on petition of the Michigan Historical Commission - ordered that the Wayne County records be transferred to the University of Michigan Law Library. This order only affected the Wayne County documents in this record group.

In 1966, Blume, having completed his published work on the territorial court records, had the law school move the entire record group to the university's Michigan Historical Collections. Though their location changed, the records remained on loan from the Michigan Historical Commission, their legal custodian.

"We appreciate the cooperation of the Bentley Library in ending this open-ended loan and uniting Michigan's court records in the Archives of Michigan," said State Archivist Mark Harvey. "These records provide fascinating windows on Michigan's past, and researchers will be better served by having all of them in their legal home, the Archives of Michigan."

The 203 years of Michigan history covered by the Supreme Court records now permanently housed in the Archives of Michigan saw important legal cases ranging from the 1866 People v. Dean, that considered the rights of African American males to vote and the 1869 Workman v. the Detroit Board of Education ruling on equal access to education to the 1994 People v. Kevorkian ruling on the legality of assisted suicide.

The Archives of Michigan is part of the Michigan Historical Center in the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. The Archives houses much of Michigan's record heritage. More than 80 million state and government records and private papers, 300,000 photographs and 500,000 maps, plus films and audio tapes are available for public research. Learn more at www.michigan.gov/archivesofmi or www.seekingmichigan.org.

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources is committed to the conservation, protection, management, use and enjoyment of the state's natural and cultural resources for current and future generations. For more information, go to www.michigan.gov/dnr.