Document Record

Creator

Great Britain. Audit Office

Title

Audit Office : AO 12. Claims, American Loyalists - Series I
Audit Office : AO 12. Réclamations, Loyalistes américains – Série I

Identifier

MIKAN: 105765
Reels/Bobines: C-9821, C-12903 to C-12905
Archival Reference/Référence Archivistique: MG 14 AO 12
oocihm.lac_mikan_105765
lac_mikan_105765

Subject

Government
Immigration
Genealogy
Gouvernement
L'immigration
Généalogie

Document source

Library and Archives Canada/Bibliothèque et Archives Canada

Notes

1776-1831
Copyright Not Evaluated/Droit d'auteur non évalué
https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/CNE/1.0/

Language

English

Description

The British Exchequer and Audit Department, more commonly known as the Audit Office, was concerned with accounts of expenditures related to colonial administration and military and naval actions associated with the acquisition and defence of colonies, including the British North American colonies which later became Canada and the United States of America. It was the principal auditing agency of the British central government and it was created in 1866 to be the modern replacement of the old Exchequer. (The final settlement of accounts was a responsibility that lay previously with the Exchequer.) The new Audit Office was entrusted with much greater power than its predecessors enabling the government to exercise effective control over the amounts of its expenditure.The accounts of all government departments, including the Treasury, were subjected to its scrutiny.
Between 1784 and 1794, the British government paid many pensions and compensations to Loyalists by authority of a series of Acts of Parliament. This collection consists of entry books and ledgers recording the memorials and schedule of losses for Loyalist claimants, plus evidence of witnesses or supporting documents; examinations, decisions and reports of the commissioners.
L’Exchequer and Audit Department de la Grande-Bretagne, mieux connu sous l’appellation d’Audit Office, avait la responsabilité des comptes de dépenses associées à l’administration coloniale, et aux opérations militaires et navales liées à l’acquisition et la défense des colonies, y compris celles de l’Amérique du Nord britannique qui, ultérieurement, allaient devenir le Canada et les États-Unis d’Amérique. L’Audit Office, le principal bureau de vérification du gouvernement central britannique, a été créé en 1866 pour remplacer l’ancien Exchequer devenu désuet. (Auparavant, le règlement final des comptes relevait de la responsabilité de l’Exchequer.) Le nouveau Audit Office s’est vu confier des pouvoirs beaucoup plus considérables que ses prédécesseurs, permettant au gouvernement d’exercer un contrôle efficace de ses dépenses. Les comptes de tous les ministères gouvernementaux, dont ceux de la Trésorerie, devaient faire l’objet d’un examen minutieux de sa part.
Entre 1784 et 1794, le gouvernement britannique a dû verser de nombreuses pensions et indemnités aux Loyalistes en vertu d’une série de lois du Parlement. Cette collection est constituée de livres d’enregistrement et autres registres dans lesquels sont consignés les mémoires et le tableau des pertes subies par les demandeurs loyalistes, avec les dépositions des témoins ou les pièces justificatives, les examens de preuves, les décisions et les rapports des commissaires.
Finding Aid 90, British Records on Microfilm, provides a microfilm shelf list, identifying the microfilm reel number, title and outside dates for each volume.
Finding Aid 250 part 1 provides an historical introduction to the Audit Office records and the inter-relationships amongst series; copies of shelf lists produced by or for the Public Record Office (now The National Archives); a shelf list correlating microfilm references for both the transcripts and the film of the originals; and notes on the utility of various published guides to Audit Office records. Finding Aid 250, part 2 reproduces the B. F. Stevens nominal index of claimants for Audit Office 12 (notably volumes 1 to 95, 99 to 106, 109 to 112) - which index is also available on reel B-1154. Microfilm reel C-9821 reproduces the principal shelf lists from FA 250 part 1 and the Stevens nominal indexes for AO 12 and AO 13 from FA 250 parts 2 and 3, respectively
Several recent published works serve as finding aids to records of the Loyalist Claims Commissioners in Audit Office 12, and to other related series. Peter Wilson Coldham's work "American Migrations, 1765-1799" (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2000) provides an analytical summary for each of the claims and evidence in both AO 12 and AO 13, organized first by the colony in which the losses occurred, then alphabetically, concluding with a nominal index. Introductory notes provide contextual information, while appendices identify related records in Treasury 50, 77 and 79. The geographical arrangement extends the book's utility beyond genealogical research, W. Bruce Antliff designed "An Inventory of Audit Office 12" (Kingston, Ontario: Antliff Publishers, 2011) to summarize the arrangement and contents of the volumes, and availability of internal indexes at various levels. Introductory notes outline the several commissions appointed to hear claims under various Acts and the patterns of survival of the records they created, whether in AO 12 or elsewhere. This presentation supports a wide range of research approaches to the records.
FA 250 part 1 provides a shelf list correlating volume titles with the reel numbers for the microfilm of the originals and of the transcriptions. FA 250 part 2 provides a nominal index to the claims.

Persistent URL

https://n2t.net/ark:/69429/s0v97zk56r1k