Worcester County sheriff Lewis Evangelidis and his team were looking to rehouse their cache of county jail records during a recent construction project and, thanks to a diligent staff member, reached out to AAS to ask if the Society was interested in acquiring the records.
The records had been otherwise set for destruction, so it was fortunate that AAS was able to step in and accept this set of registers of prisoners, people in solitary confinement, visitors, daily accounts of new prisoners, and medical records from about 1860 to 1900. These records are a great complement to the various county jail and sheriff records that AAS already houses. We are hopeful that more records will come to AAS for our many researchers interested in the history of the carceral state and the community of individuals in Worcester County who rarely make their way into records of other kinds.
~ Ashley Cataldo, Curator of Manuscripts
Hoping these will be digitized!