In order to keep track of dividend payments following the failure, bank examiners created a ledger of each extant account at the date of closure. The dividend record represents a ledger that was created by the Comptroller of Currency upon the resolution of the bank to keep track of partial payouts to depositors with accounts at the time of the failure. These records were maintained in a set of large, bound, handwritten ledgers. They contain a complete list of all numbered accounts for each available branch, the account holder’s name, the remaining balance at the time of the failure, and a record of successive dividends paid to the account holder over the next 10 years.
Availability
These records exist as bound volumes archived with the Comptroller of the Currency. The original scans are available as high quality scans from the St. Louis Federal Reserve online via Fraser, and the entries have been transcribed and made available here below. The records are grouped by city, with accounts in each city ordered by number. The list includes the account balance and the dates of payments. These account records contain the final balances for all non-running account holders. By definition, these individuals held open accounts until the closure of the bank. There are 21 cities for which dividend records still exist.
Cities
The following cities are available as high quality PDF documents obtainable through Fraser, encoded as jpeg2000 images in a combined PDF document. While the jpeg2000 format allows images to be compressed at extremely high quality, the computational burden in on-the-fly decompression can make rapidly paging through the records somewhat painful. In order to make rapid paging more manageable, we have re-encoded the images as lower quality jpeg images. For convenience, they can be found here, however please note that Fraser remains the canonical source for the original documents.
| City | Records |
|---|---|
| Alexandria | 271 |
| Atlanta | 1,376 |
| Augusta | 3,324 |
| Baltimore | 3,760 |
| Beaufort | 994 |
| Charleston | 5,142 |
| Jacksonville | 1,615 |
| Lexington | 715 |
| Lynchburg | 432 |
| Macon | 1,601 |
| Nashville | 1,859 |
| Natchez | 215 |
| NewBern | 1,033 |
| NewYork | 3,190 |
| Norfolk | 2,422 |
| Richmond | 3,681 |
| Savannah | 3,951 |
| Shreveport | 704 |
| St Louis | 1,134 |
| Tallahassee | 785 |
| Vicksburg | 2,422 |
Transcribed Records
From the dividend payment records, we record the city, account number and the balances at the time of the bank’s closure. The transcription is available here:
Full transcription of the depositor name is somewhat resource intensive and currently beyond the scope of our project. However, where the city and acount numbers have a mathing entry in the new account indecies, we have provided a list of matching entries which also contain a link to the affiliated record in Family Search. The records have been combined below with the linked record where it is available.
The account numbers can be traced back to the account numbers in the indices to new accounts to retrieve both the names and the substantial amount of demographic information recorded about each account. Note that not all cities which have available new account records have preserved dividend records. Note also that not all cities available in the dividend record have preserved new account ledger. Washington D.C. is the most notable example of the former, with extensive records in the new account indices but for which no dividend ledger is available. Norfolk is the primary example of the latter, in which the dividend record is preserved but the indices to new accounts appear to be lost.
The dividend records also contain information which we did not transcribe for this project, such as the payout to each depositor and the depositor name as recorded in the ledger itself. Transcribing this information was outside the scope of our initial project, though we may be interested in recording it in the future. If you are interested in this information as part of your own new research, please feel free to contact us.
Cross-linking to the new account indices
Because these records are a full accounting of all deposit accounts in existence at the time of the failure, and the handwritten ledgers are of very high quality, the account numbers can be cross-linked to their original entries in the indices to new accounts via account number. The account numbers recorded in this ledger, while comprehensive, represent the final account number assigned if the account number was updated through the issuance of a new passbook. Consequently, care must be taken to trace certain account numbers through the new indices of new accounts back to their original account opening where a replacement passbook was issued in order to obtain demographic information. This fact also requires that, when examining whether an account was prematurely closed by virtue of not having a corresponding entry in the final dividend ledger, researchers should probably restrict the effective date to one in which there are no gaps between the initial deposit and July 1874. If substantial gaps exist in the dividend ledger in dates between the opening of a new account and the closure of the bank, then it is possible that a new account number may have been assigned to the account in this gap. Name matching can help this process, but the commonality of many names and differences in exact spelling make this somewhat error prone.