The records of Hannah Lay and Company, of Traverse City, Michigan, are an excellent example of the archival problems encountered in attempting to preserve and organize large volumes of documents for historical research. The surviving materials, some 610 bound volumes plus 28 linear feet of loose papers, were generated by a firm which began its career as a partnership in the Chicago lumber trade around the middle of the nineteenth century; subsequently moved part of its operation to the Grand Traverse area; diversified its interests there to include Great Lakes shipping, real estate acquisition, flour milling, banking, and storekeeping; split into two corporate entities in 1883 Hannah Lay and Company and Hannah Lay Mercantile Company and continued in this dual capacity until 1931 when the Traverse City assets were liquidated. An important by-product of its corporate growth was the founding and developing of the Traverse City area. Because of Hannah Lay's many commercial ventures, as well as the length of time involved and the accounting procedures of the period, the records produced were not only numerous but varied. Standard files consisted of ledgers, daybooks, journals, bank tallies, cash books, order books, merchandise sales books, invoices, and vouchers kept at both the Traverse City and Chicago branches of the business. In addition, there were a variety of miscellaneous records such as the minutes of stockholder meetings, plat books, contracts, and loose correspondence. How much greater the total volume of the records would have been had they all survived is not known. What is known is that accidents of time and place, coupled with space requirements, progressively reduced the collection., Around 1890, for example, fire destroyed an unspecified quantity of material. The surviving papers were next stored in the basement of the Mercantile Company's new building where they remained until the firm went out of business in 1930. Apparently space became a problem as this collection grew. In 1937 the caretaker of the building reported that a portion of the records were removed several years before to additional storage space in the Traverse City Bank Building and later sold as scrap. A portion of what was left stayed in the Traverse City area and ultimately found its way into the municipal museum (Con Foster Museum) where it is housed today. This small but important fragment of Hannah Lay records consists of seven bound volumes, including the first Chicago journal, opened on May 23, 1850, and a number of early land patents. The bulk of the collection, however, passed to the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library in the summer of 1936. Even with the losses mentioned above, these materials were formidable. In September 1937, Charles J. Wolfe, then a history graduate student examining the company's early lumber activities, observed that the papers amounted to some ten tons. Moreover, Wolfe concluded that they were sufficiently complete to piece together an accurate picture of Hannah Lay's entire Michigan operation.