The original inventory of the J.F.H. Claiborne Collection - available in Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, Volume 5, 1902, pp. 203-227 (hereafter Publications) - provides the order of the original materials as they are housed in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. This revised inventory, created for the purpose of locating materials on the microfilm, is an expansion of the original inventory. Additional information has been added for clarity and to aid the researcher in locating items by microfilm number, subject heading, and context.

In the correspondence section of the collection, (Books A-C), both the name of the signatory and addressee of an item have been transcribed from the document when possible. Otherwise, the names attributed to the documents in Publications have been used.

The Poindexter letters, (Book C), were originally grouped and titled in Publications by the signatory or an event, (e.g. “Letters to George Poindexter from his son,” or, “Papers relating to duel with Abijah Hunt”). During the filming of the collection the material was rearranged to follow an alphabetical order. On this inventory, for the purposes of describing the items and to keep the contextual information provided in Publications, the groups and titles from Publications have been paraphrased and placed in brackets after the item description, (e.g. “[son],” or, “[relating to duel with Abijah Hunt]”).

For the remainder of the “books,” (Books D-G), the titles and descriptions of the material already provided by Publications have been revised for clarity. While the titles now include additional information provided by the archivist, any information received from outside sources or not apparent on the document itself has been placed in brackets. Some of the original capitalization has remained in the description.

Parenthetical notation throughout the description represents information that will help the researcher distinguish between similar documents by identifying them as copies, duplicates, triplicates, extracts, etc.

Definition of terms used in finding aid:

 [?] there is uncertainty concerning the preceding word
 [??] the name, month, or day is illegible and no interpretation could be made.
 [s.n.] the document is without a name either in the signature or the address of the document.
 [n.d.] the document has no date.
 [s.a.] the document has a date but no year.

The inventory which follows reflects those items from the collection filmed in 1975. For a list of items contained within the collection but not filmed, please refer to the addendum. Photocopies of these items are available with Z/0239.000/f.

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