Early Illinois Supreme Court Case Files to Be Digitized

[We have the following announcement from John A. Lupton, Executive Director of the Illinois Supreme Court Historic Preservation Commission.  DRE. H/t: JLG]

The Illinois Supreme Court Historic Preservation Commission was notified that we received a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for $135,000 to digitize early Illinois Supreme Court case files (1818-1865). This period includes the transformation of Illinois from a frontier state to one of the largest states in the country and covers the rise of Chicago, manufacturing/agrarian disputes, Abraham Lincoln’s legal career, slavery in Illinois, the Civil War, and a host of other topics of interest to historians, museum professionals, genealogists, and the legal community.

The grant is over a period of two years in which we will scan documents and create metadata for the cases. The end product will be a freely accessible website to search for cases via subject matter, participants, counties, etc., in order to look at PDFs of the case files.

We’re excited about this opportunity and follow in the footsteps of states like Missouri, Tennessee, and others that have their early Supreme Court records online and available for research.

For more details, here’s a link to our Illinois State Bar Association newsfeed.