State History

This article was written by Dr. James D. Folts, Head of Researcher Services at the NYS Archives and originally appeared on the Historical Society of the New York Courts website on October 17th, 2018.

Archival records of New York’s Unified Court System contain unique, valuable information about court operations and caseloads, trends in civil litigation and criminal prosecution, changes in civil and criminal procedure, the decisions of judges, the practices of trial attorneys, the rights and status of persons, and the overall impact of the courts on New York’s society since the seventeenth century. These records often provide the only documentation of ordinary people, including those who were marginalized, especially in the colonial and early national periods.

Many historical records of New York’s courts have been lost over time. An important success in preserving a major collection of those that survive occurred in early 2017, when nearly 2,000 cubic feet of records of the Supreme Court of Judicature and the Court of Chancery were transferred from the New York County Clerk’s Office to the New York State Archives in Albany (read Geof Huth’s part 1 & part 2 of his account of the transfer of documents – Geof is the Chief Records Officer and Chief Law Librarian of the New York State Unified Court System).  These records joined nearly 5,000 cubic feet of records from upstate court offices that were transferred to the State Archives in 1982, thereby creating a complete, statewide resource of historical court records dating from 1683 to 1847. Read more...