The Columbarium: A brief history of the notary public

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When my parents died and I became executor of their estate, I learned one thing very quickly: I needed to befriend a notary public. 

Almost every item of paperwork required a notary’s stamp to prove I was really, actually me. Notaries also exist to verify that people aren’t signing anything under duress, but confirming identity is the main thing. (More about what to do if you need a notary’s services here.) 

How did we come up with this system? Who decided some random person with a stamp was a good idea? 

I bet you thought I was going to blame the English. I’m afraid, however, that the ancient Egyptians are to blame for this one. 

According to the National Notary Association, the Egyptian precursors to notaries public were a bureaucratic class of scribes who chronicled all official communications in the Old Kingdom, from proclamations to tax records. Why? Because most people were illiterate. 

From there the practice moved to ancient Rome—another largely illiterate society—where a slave named Marcus Tullius Tiro developed a shorthand called notae to record Cicero’s speeches; for this achievement, Tiro is widely regarded as the first notary. Two roles eventually developed in Rome akin to modern notaries: a notarius would record judicial proceedings in shorthand, and a tabularius would record financial transactions or contracts. 

Now we can jump back to England. During the middle ages, notaries were, predictably, a church thing. It makes sense—clergy were often educated enough to write, unlike the general populace. As literacy grew over the centuries, the role became less ecclesiastical. The 1801 Public Notaries Act finally regulated the profession.

As for America, the thirteen colonies took their cues from English notaries. Thomas Fugill has the distinction of being the first official American notary public, appointed by Connecticut in 1639. He was later booted from his position and excommunicated from the church when officials discovered he had been allotting himself more land than he was supposed to. An auspicious start. 

Despite Fugill’s dishonesty, many attribute the economic success of early America to the reliability of  notaries when it came to recording cargo on merchant ships. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, notaries almost completely took over the clerical work formerly completed by justices of the peace, like administering oaths. Take that, justices of the peace. 

In England, modern notaries are fancy, well-educated legal professionals. In the United States, we decided not to do that. Basically anyone can become a notary—including yours truly! I took my oath in Kentucky last year, which required me to swear that I had neither participated nor seconded in a duel with deadly weapons. Seriously, this is a thing in Kentucky. 

The moral of the story? We might never have been subjected to the hassle of notaries public if ancient Egypt and Rome had simply prioritized teaching the general public to read. Though I don’t really believe that—we would have found some other exciting way to make settling an estate a pain in the ass.

Sources: National Notary Association, PropLogix,  John E. Seth, “Notaries in the American Colonies,” 32 J. Marshall L. Rev. 863 (1999)