John Burley arrived at the Suffolk County Court House on Court Street on the morning of May 3, 1858, with a brown leather satchel containing four blank notebooks, a small bottle of ink, and three steel-nibbed pens. He was twenty-six years old. He had been profoundly deaf since the age of seven, following a case of scarlet fever.
He had been hired the previous week as the official court reporter for the Superior Court of Suffolk County, on the recommendation of his teacher at the American Asylum for the Deaf in Hartford, a position from which he had graduated with honors in 1853.
He could not hear a witness speak. He could read lips, and he could read them faster than most hearing reporters could write, and he had developed during his years at the Asylum a personal shorthand of his own devising.
Over the next thirty-three years, until his retirement in 1891, Burley transcribed an estimated 11,000 hearings, trials, and motions in the Suffolk Superior Court. His notebooks, of which there are believed to have been somewhere between 340 and 380, contained the only verbatim record of those proceedings.
After his death in 1894, the notebooks disappeared.
The historian Margaret Hindman Hammer, in a 1991 monograph for the Massachusetts Legal Studies Association, called the Burley notebooks the largest single missing body of nineteenth-century American court record.
She was not exaggerating. The Suffolk Superior Court in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s was one of the busiest trial courts in the United States. It heard murder cases, breach of contract cases, divorces, will contests, and the criminal proceedings arising from labor unrest, immigration disputes, and the regulation of Boston's growing industrial economy.
The court's formal docket survives. The decisions of the judges survive, in published reports. What does not survive is the verbatim testimony, the words actually spoken by witnesses and lawyers. That was in Burley's notebooks.
Burley's shorthand, as best it has been reconstructed from the few fragments that survive, was based on a stenographic system he had begun studying at the Asylum but had substantially modified. It used certain conventional symbols of Gurney shorthand, certain symbols of the Pitman system that came into use in the 1860s, and a large number of symbols of his own invention, particularly for the recurring legal phrases of Boston practice.
“Burley's shorthand, as best it has been reconstructed from the few fragments that survive, was based on a stenographic system he had begun studying at the Asylum but had substantially modified.”
The most thorough modern analysis of the system was undertaken by Hammer in collaboration with the stenographic historian Lawrence Toomey in 1986. Working from three surviving fragments, totaling perhaps fourteen pages, they identified roughly forty percent of the symbols. The remainder are unreadable.
The three fragments survive by accident. Two are loose pages found in 1973 in the binding of a court ledger that had been rebound at some point in the late nineteenth century, presumably with scrap paper used as backing. The third is a single sheet that Burley had used to demonstrate his system to a visiting British shorthand teacher named James Tideswell in 1879, and which Tideswell preserved in his own papers, now at the British Library.
The disappearance of the rest of the notebooks is the central puzzle of Hammer's monograph.
Burley retired in May 1891 and moved that summer to a small house in Dedham, where he had a sister and her family. He took his notebooks with him. This much is established by the recollection of his successor at the court, Reuben Gass, who in a 1903 letter to the Boston Bar Association described helping Burley load nine crates of his notebooks onto a wagon.
Burley died on January 22, 1894, of complications from a winter cough. His sister, Charlotte Burley Andrews, inherited his estate. The estate inventory, filed in Norfolk County Probate Court that March, lists furniture, books, personal effects, and a bank account totaling forty-three dollars and sixteen cents. It does not mention the notebooks.
Hammer, who reviewed the inventory in 1986, considered the omission deliberate.
Charlotte Andrews lived until 1908. After her death, the house in Dedham passed to her daughter, Emily Andrews Pickett. The notebooks, if they had remained in the house, would presumably have been in Pickett's possession.
Pickett married in 1911 and moved to Newton. The Dedham house was sold the following year to a family named Lothrop. The Lothrops lived in the house until 1947, when it was demolished to widen a road.
The historian Hammer interviewed the surviving Lothrop son, Frederick, in 1987. He had no memory of any quantity of notebooks in the house during his childhood. He did remember, however, his mother once describing a quantity of strange handwritten books that had been in the attic when his parents bought the house, and that his father had burned.
The interview is the closest the trail has come to closure. Hammer was unable to confirm the burning. Frederick Lothrop was eighty-four years old at the time of the interview. He died the following year.
If the notebooks were burned in the Dedham attic in 1912 or thereabouts, the loss is final. If they were not, they may yet be somewhere. Hammer's monograph ends with a sober note that the Massachusetts attics have not yet all been searched.
The question that haunts the missing record is what was in it. Hammer identified, from the docket, eleven cases of substantial historical interest whose verbatim testimony would significantly alter the existing scholarship. They include a 1872 trial of three labor organizers, a 1878 will contest involving a member of the Adams family, and an 1885 criminal prosecution of a Boston police officer for the death of an Irish immigrant.
In all of these, the formal court record gives the outcome but not the testimony. The testimony was in Burley's hand. He took it down and went home and put the notebook on the shelf, and the next morning he came back and started a new one.
He worked thirty-three years and filled hundreds of notebooks. His successor used a different system. The notebooks went to Dedham, and then they were gone.
What he heard, with his eyes, is not in the public record. The public record is poorer for it. The libraries and the archives in Boston still keep, on a list maintained at the Social Law Library, an item under the heading Burley notebooks, if found. The list has not been updated in some years.
