Chancery Court Case File Index Now Available

The volunteers at the Archives have finished the processing of the Chancery Court case files. While the Chancery Court minute books and dockets survive back to 1865, few of the corresponding case files survive prior to 1925. The Chancery case files at the Archives mostly span from 1930-1970. Later case files are still held by the Clerk and Master's office.

Cases heard in Chancery Court often involved the sale of family farms, and required every member of the family to be identified in order to determine each heir's share of the sale proceeds. For this reason, Chancery case files can be very genealogically rich, tracing the ancestors and the family's history of ownership of the farm, and can span dozens or sometimes hundreds of pages.

The Chancery Court case files have not been digitized, and likely won't be for years to come, but they are available for research during Archives' business hours. Individual files can be digitized on request.

The case file index can be viewed from the Records page of the Archives' website.