ATLANTA - An archivist was going through historical records at the state archives when he came across a forgotten piece of history.

Gregory Jarrell was looking at microfilm last week when the date, "March 2, 1777" jumped out at him.

He went to the vault and pulled out the bound volume that had the original document.

Mr. Jarrell had found what archivists think is Georgia's only official recording of the Declaration of Independence.

The names of all 56 signatories - including two buried in Augusta, Lyman Hall and George Walton, - appear on the document, though they are not original signatures.

State Archives Director David Carmicheal said the handwritten document probably was recorded by a scribe or clerk after Congress dispatched a copy of the original document from Philadelphia to the nation's 13 original states.

Mr. Carmicheal said 12 other such documents might exist in the other states.

The document survived the Revolutionary War and the Civil War in the next century. Mr. Carmicheal said it has probably sat, unnoticed, in the state archives since the agency was formed in 1918.

State archivists will conduct further investigation of the document, looking for clues in the ink, paper, handwriting techniques and even the water marks on the pages to authenticate a time period and possibly establish exactly where it was written.

The document was most likely recorded in Savannah or in encampments nearby.

Mr. Carmicheal said that unlike the 200 to 500 copies of the Declaration of Independence that were made in the printing shop of John Dunlap right after its adoption by Congress in 1776, the Georgia document is an original.

"The Dunlap Broadside is a beautiful document, but it was not an official document," he said. "This is an official record."

Mr. Jarrell found the document in a volume called State Officers Appointments 1789-1827, Part 2, which was most recently bound in 1945.

He said the person who did the binding made an error with the dates.