The Lost Records Localities Digital Collection consists of copies of records from counties or incorporated cities that have suffered significant record loss due to intense military activity (predominantly during the Civil War), courthouse fires, theft, vandalism, water damage, pest damage, and/or natural disasters. Copies are made from surviving records such as wills and deeds found in the court records of other localities as part of chancery and other circuit court records processing projects. The “lost” documents are digitally scanned and the images and pertinent information are added to the Lost Records Localities Digital Collection available on Virginia Memory.

The Lost Records Localities project has been an ongoing one for the Library of Virginia for decades. During the mid-1910’s, Virginia’s first state archivist Morgan P. Robinson sent a letter to all clerks inquiring about the state of the records in their courthouses.  Many responded saying the records were destroyed during the American Revolution, Civil War, courthouse fire, etc. The coming of the Circuit Court Records Preservation Program in the early 1990’s continued this project and enabled the hiring of additional archival staff to process circuit court records, mainly chancery causes. While processing chancery, archivists identify documents from localities that suffered loss of records–a Will of Matthew Koon, 1731, recorded in Stafford County and used as an exhibit in a Fauquier County chancery cause or an 1800 Hanover County deed used as an exhibit in an Isle of Wight County chancery cause. The “lost” documents are scanned, identified, indexed, and placed into an artificial digital collection that is now known as the Lost Records Localities Collection. 

Digital images and catalog records for items in the collection are uploaded to the Lost Records Digital Collection and made available for patrons to search. Recently, a new search feature was added to enable patrons to search by name of person, record type, and locality. Additional records will be added to the digital collection periodically as our archivists continue to identify “lost” documents in the records they process. Please check back as this is an ongoing project.

For more information and a listing of lost records localities, see the Lost Records Research Note.

-Greg Crawford, Local Records Coordinator

The Library of Virginia is pleased to announce that digital images from the Prince George County chancery causes digitization project are now available on the Chancery Records Index. Both the images and the index cover the years 1809-1917 and are available to researchers on the LVA’s Virginia Memory site. 

The following are a few suits of interest found in the newly available Prince George County chancery digital images.  Richard W. Backus vs. Admr. of John B. Williams, etc., 1837-003, references the postponement of the sale of a slave named Ursa because she was ill. Divorce suit 1875-001, David Harrison vs. Eliza A. Harrison, includes a letter from the court clerk referencing the destruction of a marriage license by the “Raiders” during the Civil War. Another divorce suit, Bettie Hays vs. William Hays, 1908-003 provides detailed testimony given by the plaintiff of spousal abuse by her husband. (These divorce cases join one already mentioned here on Out of the Box – a divorce in which the husband claimed that the child his wife gave birth to could not possibly be his.) In chancery cause 1916-023, Cubit Stith vs. Lucy Jackson, etc., Cubit Stith describes himself as an uneducated colored man who was born a slave. He and his daughter, Lucy Jackson, were in a bitter dispute for control of a piece of property that had recently increased in value due to DuPont locating a plant near it. Stith stated that Jackson “cursed him and used abuse too foul to repeat” when he asked her to turn over the deed for the property and that she talked “about selling the property and [threatened] to turn him out of the said property as well as her mother, which would leave them homeless in their old age.”

The senior Davis, born 5 February 1915 in Providence, Rhode Island, often did odd jobs and ran errands for pilots and airport personnel at the original Providence airport near his uncle’s farm.  Payment or reward for his work would often come in the form of airplane rides, which Davis would turn into lessons.  He soon earned his private pilot’s license, and on a list issued by the Commerce Department in January 1939, Davis was the only African American pilot from Rhode Island.  World War II began in Europe later that year, and in 1940 the United States began preparing for involvement by establishing a draft.  Like many others, Davis did not wait for the draft to find him, but rather enlisted in the Army Air Forces in 1941.  He joined a select group of African American men in the 99^th Pursuit Squadron training at Chanute Field in Rantoul, Illinois.  Unfortunately for Davis, he did not qualify as a pilot, most likely because he did not have a college degree.

The unit relocated to Tuskegee, Alabama, where the pilots continued their training.  Davis, along with others, remained at Chanute to train as mechanics until the Tuskegee field could accommodate them.  The Tuskegee Airmen faced a huge obstacle in the racism of the time.  Many believed that African Americans were incapable of serving in the military in almost any capacity beyond basic behind-the-lines support.  The Tuskegee Airmen refuted this notion and served ably when transferred to the European Theater of the war.  The squadrons escorted 200 of 205 bomber missions without a loss, the best record of any bomber escort group during the war.  The unit twice received Presidential Unit Citations.  Equally as impressive as their war record was their maintenance of such a high standard, both in the United States and abroad, in the face of often overt racism.

The yearbook, published in 1943 and titled Tuskegee Army Flying School and AAF 66th FTD, provides an excellent portrait of the Tuskegee Airmen in training.  After supplying a general history of the Army Air Forces, the volume displays images of Tuskegee’s officers, cadets, and training and support personnel, including Ralph Davis as a member of the 889^th Basic Flying Training Squadron.  It not only chronicles the aviators and their support units, but also includes photographs of the field’s medical department, the band, the quartermaster’s units, the signal corps, and the ordinance company.  The yearbook includes photographs of these men at work and training, as well as at rest and leisure, providing valuable documentation of African Americans serving in the military during World War II.

Ralph Davis’s service in the Army Air Forces was only one episode in an active life.  Besides earning his pilot’s license before the war, he also was a star athlete in high school (baseball and basketball) and later a semi-professional baseball player.  In his baseball career, Davis helped integrate two semi-professional leagues in Rhode Island, first the Pawtucket Twilight League as a member of the East Providence Belmonts and then the Pawtucket Inter City League as a member of the East Providence Townies.  He also played on area African American ball clubs and earned a spot on the Boston Chronicle’s all-star team from 1933 to 1935.  In 2012, the Pawtucket Red Sox honored Davis.  Clinton Davis accepted the honor for his father.

During the war, Davis went on leave to Front Royal, Virginia, with a friend who lived there.  While in Front Royal, he met Mary Tate (1920-1983), a teacher from Staunton.  After a quick courtship, the two married and Davis settled down in Staunton.  After World War II, he worked for the Augusta County Board of Supervisors.  In 1968 Davis, along with fellow Staunton residents Larry Williams and Conrad Maxwell, purchased a 1947 Piper Cub airplane.  From 1985 to 1986, Davis and Williams put in 500 man hours to restore the aircraft.  Davis often flew and displayed it at events in the Shenandoah Valley. 

Ralph Davis died 16 November 2002 and was buried in Thornrose Cemetery in Staunton.  The Ralph Hickman Davis Papers (LVA Accession 50284) are open for research at the Library of Virginia.

-Trenton Hizer, Senior Finding Aids Archivist

The Library of Virginia is pleased to announce the addition of Surry County to the cohabitation register digitization project.  This project, via the Virginia Memory website, aims to index, digitize, transcribe, and provide access to all known Virginia cohabitation registers and the related registers of children whose parents had ceased to cohabit.

The Surry County register contains some of the most delightful names that one may have had the opportunity to run across in a historical document.  Could one of these fine folks be an ancestor of yours? 

• Champion Blizzard
• Mike Blow and his wife Anarchy
• Champion Bird
• Squire Charity
• Nancy Drew
• Cherry Birdsong
• Jim Beets
• Queen Anne Gray
• Sharper Falcon
• Sam Wisdom
• Harry Honeycatt
• Sucky Blue
• Nancy Pooten
• Jupiter Cheeseman
• Indiana Charity
• Robin Wren and his wife Amy Falcon
• Cheeseman Smith
• Moses Twine
• Dolphin Morris
• Harry Falcon and his wife Susan Hasty

Cohabitation registers are among the most important genealogical resources for African-Americans attempting to connect their family lines back through the oftentimes murky past to their enslaved ancestors. The registers date from 1866 and provide a snapshot in time for the individuals recorded therein and a wealth of information that may otherwise be impossible, or at least very difficult, to uncover. Cohabitation registers were the legal vehicles by which former slaves legitimized both their marriages and their children. The information about an individual person contained in a cohabitation register is literally priceless as it is often the first time that a former slave appeared officially in the public record and because of the extensive kinds of information that the register recorded.

Prior to the close of the Civil War, Virginia law provided no legal recognition for slave marriages. On 27 February 1866, the General Assembly enacted a law that entitled formerly enslaved people who had married during slavery to all of the rights and privileges as if they had been duly married by law and declared all of their children legitimate, whether born before or after the passage of this act. The surviving Virginia cohabitation registers recorded the name of the husband, his age, place of birth, residence, occupation, last owner, last owner’s city or county of residence, the name of the wife, her age, place of birth, residence, last owner, last owner’s city or county of residence, name of children with the ages of each, and the date of commencement of cohabitation.

For more information on the cohabitation registers, see an earlier blog post “Solid Genealogical Gold,” about the Register of Colored Persons of Smyth County, Virginia, cohabiting together as Husband and Wife on 27^th February 1866.

The Surry County register, transcription, and searchable index are available online along with the other registers from Virginia localities in the Cohabitation Register Digital Collection in Virginia Memory. To find it use either the link provided or go to Virginia Memory, choose Digital Collections, then Collections A to Z, and finally Cohabitation Registers.

-Sarah Nerney, Senior Local Records Archivist

In the early 1980s, Mary Helen Gravitt went looking for a coffin. Gravitt, then a secretary at Virgilina Elementary School, was looking for a Halloween decoration in an old store building but stumbled upon a piece of Virgilina’s history. So began the strange turn of events that led to the town of Virgilina’s first town council minute book’s arrival at the Library of Virginia where it will be preserved, reformatted, and stored for posterity.

Recognizing the significance of Gravitt’s find, teacher Hallie T. Owen studied the book and published an article in the South  Boston News and Record back in February 1983. Owen wrote in celebration of Virgilina’s 83^rd birthday and described the town’s ordinances and regulations which ranged from the prohibition of playing marbles in town streets to allowing bar partitions that separated white and African American customers. Not knowing what to do with the volume but recognizing its importance, Mary Helen Gravitt held onto the book for the next thirty years.

At the chance request of a South Boston history buff, Owen’s 1983 article was reprinted in February of this year and spotted by the mother-in-law of one our archivists. Local Records director Carl Childs followed up on the article and with the help of Hallie Owen was able to track down the whereabouts of the minute book and persuade the town to donate the volume to the library. Childs emphasized that “we are not hoarders” here at the Library of Virginia and that our goal is to see that historic public records are preserved and made accessible. The Library of Virginia will microfilm the Virgilina town council minute book and ensure that the public has ready access to the reformatted records.

The Library of Virginia is pleased to announce the addition of records from Fluvanna, Goochland, and Montgomery Counties to the cohabitation register digitization project.  This project, via the Virginia Memory website, aims to index, digitize, transcribe, and provide access to all known Virginia cohabitation registers and the related registers of children whose parents had ceased to cohabit.

The cohabitation registers were the legal vehicles by which formerly enslaved couples legitimized their pre-slavery marriages and the children of unions that no longer existed in 1866 due to death or other circumstances such as the wife being sold away.  These records are invaluable resources for genealogists and historians alike.

Goochland and Montgomery have to date only uncovered their cohabitation registers.  Fluvanna, however, includes both the cohabitation register and the register of children whose parents had ceased to cohabit by 1866.  The registers, transcriptions, and searchable indexes are available online along with the other registers from Virginia localities in the Cohabitation Register Digital Collection in Virginia Memory. To find it use either the link provided or go to Virginia Memory, choose Digital Collections, then Collections A to Z, and finally Cohabitation Registers.

For more information on the cohabitation registers, see an earlier blog post Solid Genealogical Gold, about the Register of Colored Persons of Smyth County, Virginia, cohabiting together as Husband and Wife on 27^th February 1866.

-Sarah Nerney, Senior Local Records Archivist

The latest images from the Augusta County Chancery Causes are now available on the Chancery Records Index. With this addition, fifty boxes of Augusta County chancery covering the time period from 1879 through 1895 may be viewed online.

Following are a few suits of interest found in this latest addition. Augusta County Chancery Cause 1880-119 is a contract dispute that centered on the construction of an addition to Wesleyan Female Institute in Staunton. The case includes numerous exhibits such as the 1877-1878 school bulletin (image# 134-159), receipts for building materials (image# 195, 200) and two drawings of the addition (image# 213, 215). Augusta County Chancery Causes 1884-057 and 1895-023 are property disputes in which the plaintiffs accuse the defendants of doing harm to the value of their property. In the first suit, the plaintiff argues that heat and fumes from the defendant’s brick kiln adversely affected the value of his property (image# 41). In the second suit, the defendant built a slaughterhouse and stockyard near the plaintiff’s house (image# 491) polluting a stream and causing insufferable smells and noises all of which depreciated the value of the plaintiff’s property. Most notably, this portion of the Augusta County Chancery Causes includes suits that have their origins in the real estate boom and bust period of 1890s western Virginia. Many of the suits contain plats of subdivisions and towns (Basic City, for example) that never came to be or were short-lived. See Augusta County Chancery Causes 1893-030 (image# 103-104, 106), 1893-120 (image# 101), 1894-131 (image #139), and 1894-148 (image# 44).

These cases are representative of the over ten thousand found in the Augusta County Chancery Causes collection that document the rich heritage of Augusta County and western Virginia. This scanning project is funded by the Circuit Court Records Preservation Program and a $150,000 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).

-Vince Brooks, Senior Local Records Archivist

At one o’clock in the morning on 1 September 1859, Milly T. King arrived at the home of James Clary and found his slave Hannah “lying on the hearth gasping for breath, and I thought dying.” When King saw Hannah an hour later, she was dead. The following day Brunswick County coroner William Lett arrived to examine the body.  With him were twelve men, none of whom had a medical background but rather were chosen as upstanding men and representatives of the county. The office of coroner held inquisitions in cases when persons met a sudden, violent, unnatural, or suspicious death. In this case Hannah had certainly met a sudden and suspicious demise.

Hannah, owned by the late Elizabeth H. Harwell, had been in the possession of James Clary, who adamantly maintained that the marks found on her feet and legs and the wound on her head were not from anything suspicious but came as a result of a fall from a window occurring a few weeks before her death. The coroner and his jury of white men were left to decide if Hannah had suffered an accidental death or if her death had been caused by something more malicious. Clary’s wife, Eliza, backed up her husband’s statements and claimed to know nothing of Hannah’s death, maintaining that her wounds were caused by the fall. But the Clarys’ neighbors painted a different picture of the events surrounding Hannah’s death.

Milly King heard Hannah “wailing and begging as though she was under severe chastisement” and reported Eliza Clary saying “she would kill [Hannah] if she did not do better.” Samuel King recalled seeing Hannah “tied across a log hands and feet” with Clary “whipping her with a leather rein doubled” two weeks prior to her death. Clary was said to have explained that he was “whipping her for going in the table cloth and taking out something to eat.” Samuel testified that he heard Hannah at other times, including the day before she died, “making lamentations as if under severe chastisement and sometimes for nearly an hour at a time.” Another neighbor also heard “some person begging and heard some blows as if inflicted with a large switch…”

Faced with contradictory evidence from witnesses, a doctor was finally summoned to provide a physician’s view of events. Dr. Robert S. Powell testified that all of Hannah’s wounds “did their part in hastening the fatal termination,” and the large wound on her head “would ultimately have produced death without medical assistance.” When questioned if her myriad of wounds could have come from a fall, Powell replied that the large head wound could have, but that her other wounds could not have come from the same fall. Powell further believed that “the marks of chastisements had been inflicted about 48 hours” before he saw her, which certainly contradicted Clary’s claims that Hannah’s wounds came from a fall occurring weeks before her death.

After examining the body and hearing testimony, the coroner and his jurors determined that Hannah did not die from a fall but that the “deceased came to her death by abuse inflicted on her person at sundry times during the present year and in various ways by choking and by blows inflicted on her head, body, and limbs,” and some of the blows appeared “to have been inflicted with switches and by other heavier weapons we know not what in the hands of James Clary.”

Virginia coroners were frequently called upon to investigate the deaths of slaves and were often reluctant to place blame in these instances. In the case of Hannah, the coroner and jury did not hesitate to blame Clary for her murder. However, a similar case in Petersburg showed a different outcome. Reuben, a 40-year-old slave, died in 1843 after being “severely whipped” by John Minetree. The coroner found “his body marked with many blows of the cowhide” yet the whipping was not considered a sufficient cause of death. It was determined that Reuben came to his death from an “undue quantity of cold water in his stomach, while under excessive heat and exhaustion.” The coroner and his jury censured the severity of the whipping, but Minetree was discharged from all murder charges.  A similar death happened in Frederick County when Lucy met her end in 1833. Earlier on the day of her death, Lucy had been whipped about the thighs as punishment for stealing some “trifling article” from a neighbor. After her punishment she was sent about her day’s work. While working over the fire Lucy fainted and struck her head on the hearth. The coroner determined that the whipping and fall were the cause of her death but no blame was placed on her owner because there was “no intention to kill on the part of her master.”

The separate office of coroner was created in about 1660 to hold inquisitions into sudden, suspicious, and violent deaths. Causes of death found in coroner’s inquisitions include murder, infanticide, suicide, exposure to the elements, drownings, train accidents, and natural causes. Coroner’s inquisitions are a valuable source for local, social, and legal history. They are especially useful for those researching African Americans. The gender and race of the deceased was often noted in the inquests. If the deceased was African American, the inquest would identify the individual as either a slave or a free person, and if the deceased was a slave, the inquest would include the name of the slaveowner. Currently, the following counties and cities have coroner’s inquisitions available for research at the Library of Virginia: Amelia County, Amherst County, Arlington County, Bedford County, Botetourt County, Brunswick County, Charlotte County, Frederick County, Henrico County, Norfolk County, Petersburg (City), and Rockbridge County.

-Bari Helms, Local Records Archivist

On Thursday, October 20, staff from the Library of Virginia’s Local Records Services Branch were in Jersey City, New Jersey, to formally accept one of the Commonwealth’s long-lost treasures – a Stafford County record book taken from Virginia in 1863 by a Union officer serving in a New York regiment. 

 The volume, an order book detailing the daily activities of the court from 1749 to 1755, was transcribed by a Stafford deputy clerk in 1791.  The book was removed from the Stafford courthouse by Captain W. A. Treadwell of the 4^th N.Y. Regiment and was long considered to be a casualty of the war.  A note inside the front cover and presumably in Treadwell’s hand states that it was “Taken from Stafford Court House, March 30 1863.”

 The volume was handed down several times over many years before it was presented to the Hudson County Historical Society. The Society’s collection eventually was transferred to the collection of the Jersey City Free Public Library’s New Jersey Room. Recognizing that the order book did not fit within the New Jersey Room’s collection policy, Jersey City Public Library’s John Beekman contacted the LVA to return the volume to its rightful home in Virginia.  The volume will be conserved at LVA’s in-house conservation lab and scanned and microfilmed to ensure its preservation. Scanned images will be presented to the Stafford County Circuit Court Clerk’s office so that the citizens of the county will have ready access to a volume long thought to be lost.

 Stafford County is one of a number of Virginia localities that suffered major records losses during the Civil War due to acts of vandalism in which records were seized by Union soldiers and destroyed or taken as souvenirs.  The Library of Virginia is the repository that holds many of the records that still exist from the colonial era. “It is time for this volume, after nearly a century and a half, to be returned to an institution where it can be preserved and made accessible to researchers,” said Beekman, New Jersey Room assistant manager.

 “The Library of Virginia is pleased to accept this volume on behalf of Barbara Decatur, the Stafford County Circuit Court Clerk, and the citizens of Stafford County and the Commonwealth of Virginia,” said Carl Childs, director of Local Records Services at the Library of Virginia.  “The return of this volume helps to fill a gap in the history of Stafford County and its inhabitants,” Childs said.

 “For the Library of Virginia to receive back a unique, irreplaceable 18^th-century ledger almost 150 years after it was stolen and after all expectation of its return had long ago died, is nothing short of miraculous.  Perhaps other archivists will be inspired by John’s action to take a closer look at items that don’t really fit the scope of their collection and find more suitable homes or even the rightful homes for any such items,” added New Jersey Room manager Cynthia Harris.

[Editor's Note: A "Welcome Home" ceremony was held at the Stafford County Courthouse on December 1, 2011, to celebrate the order book's return and to allow the public and local officials to get a glimpse of this rare volume. For more on the celebration see the article "Lost Ledger Returns Home" from fredericksburg.com.]

The Library of Virginia recently acquired business records of Ephraim Baker (1836-1919) of Mount Olive, Virginia (Accession 51052).  Baker, born on 13 December 1836 in Topnot, Shenandoah County, Virginia, was the son of Lewis Baker (1808-1889) and Anna Dellinger (1811-1879). He operated a general store in Mount Olive for most of his life. The store was used as a hospital during the Civil War. Ephraim Baker was married twice, and died on 19 June 1919. He is buried in St. Stephen’s Cemetery in Strasburg.

The majority of the collection consists of correspondence, accounts, and accounts of sales to Baker from commission merchants in Alexandria and Baltimore. The correspondence includes information on market conditions and current prices of goods being sold. There are also circulars, advertisements, and price lists from various merchants. Baker was an agent for the Davis Sewing Machine Company of Watertown, New York, and the collection contains correspondence and invoices from the company’s headquarters. Also included are customer orders from local residents requesting goods from Baker’s store.

Among the records is an 1871 Green & Brother catalog with annotated prices. Nineteenth century furniture catalogs or price lists are fairly unusual to find, and this one has particular importance for the furniture making business in Virginia. As early as 1820, English born cabinetmaker William Green was advertising his furniture in the Alexandria Gazette.  From their beginning, the Green family emphasized providing furniture to country customers. The shipping of flour from the Shenandoah Valley to Alexandria helped provide a connection to these customers. By 1834, the Green furniture business, then headed by William’s son James, purchased a three-story brick building on the corner of  Prince and Fairfax Streets in Alexandria. In the same year, a steam engine was installed for sawing and turning wood. By 1857, the business was run by James’s sons John W. and Stephen A., and the company became Green & Brother. By the 1850’s, merchants from the Shenandoah Valley were a large customer base for the company. In 1868, John W. Green was replaced by his brother James E. Green. The company continued operation until 1887. The price list has detailed descriptions of a variety of furniture forms with options available to customers. For more information on the Green cabinetmaking business, see The Green Family of Cabinetmakers : An Alexandria Institution, 1817-1887 (Alexandria, VA : The Lyceum, 1986 ).

The Ephraim Baker Records, cataloged as Accession 50152, are open to research at the Library of Virginia.  In addition to the business records, there is also personal correspondence from Baker’s family, and numerous photographs, mostly of the Frye family of Woodstock, Virginia. Click here to view the finding aid for the collection.

-Chris Kolbe, Archives Reference Coordinator, and Jim Greve, Senior Collection Development Archivist