Digitized U.S. District Court Name Indexes and Dockets
Over the last several years, the National Archives at Boston has been prioritizing the digitization of dockets and name indexes to U.S. District Court cases in order to facilitate access to these high use records. Included are criminal, civil, and bankruptcy indexes and dockets that can be used to locate parties and case numbers for cases heard in the U.S. District Courts for Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont.
Dockets provide a record of papers filed and proceedings held during a case, and include information on the parties, lawyers, and presiding judge. They are arranged by the type of case (criminal, civil, etc.) and then by a sequential docket number. In the example on the left, # 56-89 refers to the 89th criminal case heard by the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts in 1956.
Name indexes generally include a case number and parties involved in a particular case. Occasionally these records also include a filing date and the name of the presiding judge. As a rule, index series are not always comprehensive, and should be used together with relevant dockets to confirm the details of a particular case.
Links to digitized records in the National Archives Catalog can be found below. For a general overview of court records held at National Archives facilities, please see the National Archives Court Records page.
U.S. District Court, Connecticut
U.S. District Court, Maine
U.S. District Court, Massachusetts
U.S. District Court, New Hampshire
U.S. District Court, Rhode Island
U.S. District Court, Vermont