Judges focuses on both the coroners themselves and the juries of inquest. Who typically served on juries; who served as coroner; and how did this change over time? What social and cultural role did these ‘judges’ play in the nineteenth-century South? Were they ‘just’? What effect did serving as coroners or inquest jurors have on these men?

Meet the Coroners examines the process by which coroners were chosen and went about their work.

Meet the Jurors analyzes the men who served on inquest juries. Usually less affluent than the coroner, they also left fewer records, but the section attempts to paint a collective portrait of the men who deliberated and decided on causes of death in the nineteenth-century South.

NEXT: Meet the Coroners