Week Eleven at the Maryland State Archives

Last week was pretty low key. I continued record stripping of the manumission records in the Maryland State Colonization Society and prepared a presentation to give to undergraduate history majors at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. I also attended a meeting of the Maryland Hall of Records Commission, an advisory body to MSA.

While prepping for my presentation, I came across a curious committal notice in our database. A suspected runaway slave, “a Negro man, who calls himself Mary Ann Waters,” was detained, leading the sheriff to advertise a committal notice in newspapers. The committal notice describes a well-dressed person wearing garments of satin, velvet, and fine wool, who had “been hiring out … as a woman for the last three years.” The only other record linked to this person in our database is for a release from jail four months after the committal. This advertisement raises some fascinating, and likely unanswerable, questions in the field of gender studies.