Individuals today wishing to conduct research using Rockingham County court records may encounter a few stumbling blocks. Due to two major events in the locality’s history, Rockingham County is identified as one of Virginia’s Lost Record localities. The first loss of Rockingham records occurred in 1787 when a courthouse fire destroyed primarily wills and estate records. A second and even more devastating loss came during the Civil War.

In June 1864, with the threat of Union troops advancing into the valley, concerned citizens of the county wanted court records (mostly volumes) removed from the courthouse so that the records could not be destroyed. A judge granted permission for these records to be moved to a safer place east of the Blue Ridge.  A teamster and wagon were hired to remove the records, but the wagon was left on the Port Republic-Forge road after a rim was lost and a tire came off. During this delay, Union troops spied the wagon and partially destroyed the records by setting fire to it.  The mother of a Confederate soldier extinguished the fire by carrying water and smothering the fire with green hay just cut from a nearby field.  She retrieved what was left of the records and took them to her home for safekeeping.  The records remained at her home for quite some time, and because the records were not carefully guarded, individuals came and took records related to themselves or their families.  Eventually, what records remained were returned to the courthouse; however, many order books, deed books, will books and fiduciary books were lost or severely damaged by the fire. 

In 2005, a Library of Virginia researcher made a startling discovery—he came across a box of miscellaneous loose and bound documents.  It so happened that this box contained burnt fragments of Rockingham County’s original wills and administrations (including estate inventories and guardians’ accounts) saved from that wagon fire in 1864. The history behind how the Library of Virginia came to acquire these records is found in the locality accession records. The files for Rockingham County date from 1864 to 2010 and offer two possibilities. The first and best possibility is that the records came from Duke University which returned 18,000 items and 121 volumes to the LVA on 22 June 1951 (accession 23707).  The second possibility (accession 25144) is that the records were purchased as part of 1,500 items from the Chesapeake Book Company on 1 April 1960.

Because of the extensive damage to the perimeter of many of the pages and to prevent further loss of valuable information, the more fragile items were sent to the Library’s in-house conservation lab. Pages were encapsulated and returned for the difficult task of historical reconstruction. As a result of the fire damage, pagination and recorded dates were effectively removed. The time consuming task of reconstruction was handed over to one of Local Records Services’ most experienced archivists, Louise Jones. She devised an elaborate scheme for painstakingly researching and reconstructing the original volumes for microfilm purposes.  Her work encompassed various steps to organize the items into will books.  The first step involved taking notes from county order books to determine which documents were recorded on which dates. For pages burnt on all four edges, she determined which side of the page was the spine side.  Next, she looked at the page to see if she could find the name of the deceased and the date the document was recorded.  For pages without dates or names of the deceased, she denoted the type of document and then looked for names and dates within the documents. If the document was an estate sale, she noted the names of the purchasers and compared the names to the list of purchasers in other estate sales. Comparing unique items sold with items listed in inventories helped determine the name of the deceased. For her final step, she compared handwriting, the darkness or lightness of the ink, page size, and the color of the paper or water stains to determine where the page belonged in the will book.

Nine volumes were painstakingly reconstructed dating from 1803 to 1862. Once reconstructed, the original volumes were microfilmed in-house by the staff of OCLC Preservation Service Center (now Backstage Library Works). The nine microfilm reels generated were made available to the public in 2005.  The volumes were then retired to the State Records Center because of their fragile nature.

The Rockingham County Wills and Administrations, 1803-1862 (Microfilm Reels 667-675), are available for research at the Library of Virginia and the Rockingham County Circuit Clerk’s Office. Additional Rockingham County court records can be found in the Lost Records Localities Digital Collection. More information on the digital collection can be found in this previous blog post.

-Callie Lou Freed, Local Records Archivist

While watching the February 2012 episode of NBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? featuring actor and Petersburg native Blair Underwood investigating his family history, Library of Virginia staff could not help but notice that one of the original volumes displayed on the show was not in great shape.  The Amherst County Register of Free Negroes, 1822-1864, was used on the show to prove that one of Underwood’s ancestors had been a free person prior to the Civil War.  The front and back covers of the volume had become detached from the spine, pages were loose, and overall it did not look like the book could withstand much handling without sustaining further damage to its fragile pages.  This led to a reevaluation of the existing conservation priority for the 30 free Negro registers in the Library’s holdings.  Previously it was thought that since all of the free Negro registers were microfilmed, the original volumes would not be handled by the public any longer, thus conservation money would be better spent on other items.  However, the resurgence of interest in African American genealogy, the sesquicentennial of the Civil War and related issues, and interest in the registers for display in exhibits clearly indicated that a change was necessary.  A conservation inventory was done for all of the volumes and the ones that require treatment will receive it over time and as funds allow.

So what is a free Negro register and why do they exist?  In 1803 the Virginia General Assembly passed an act that required every free Negro or mulatto to be registered and numbered in a book to be kept by the county clerk. The register listed the age, name, color, stature, marks or scars, and in what court the person was emancipated or whether the person was born free. A free person was required to carry a copy of this register on them in order to prove their free status.  It was a criminal offense to not be registered, and a free person could be sold into slavery if they were unable to produce sufficient proof of their status.  Enforcement of these laws was done locally and could be inconsistent.  Times of great societal fear about a locality’s black population would often result in an increase in both registrations and prosecutions for being unregistered—for example, following Nat Turner’s uprising.  The free Negro registers were thus both instruments of control over the free black population of the state but also a safeguard of an individual’s free status should it ever be challenged.  The registers provide wonderful physical descriptions of free people that give the researcher a real idea of what someone looked like, information often hard to come by for other groups of the pre-Civil War era.  They are extremely important records for genealogists and have been used by historians for a variety of avenues of inquiry.

The first four volumes chosen for conservation were completed and returned to the Library of Virginia from Etherington Conservation Services in March 2013.  Included among them is the Amherst County register from Who Do You Think You Are?  The pages have been cleaned, mended, and deacidified.  The original boards of the cover have been retained because they were still in good shape although they got a restorative touch-up with watercolor and pencil.  The old leather bindings have been replaced with new leather.  The other volumes are three registers from Amelia County that date from 1804-1835, 1835-1855, and 1855-1865.  These registers all had broken bindings, loose or completely separated covers, and loose pages.  As the pictures show, the conservators completely replaced all of the covers and bindings on the Amelia registers.  The new bindings and board cover patterns were matched as closely as possible to the originals.  All of the pages of the volumes have been cleaned, mended, deacidified, and resewn into their new bindings.  The Amherst and Amelia free Negro registers are now ready for their Hollywood close-ups!  These registers still will not be available to the general researcher since copies exist on microfilm, but their conservation will ensure that these important volumes are preserved for future generations, and, when they are needed for a special display purpose, that they are in a physical state to withstand such handling and exhibition.

Conservation of archival records, maps, and books is expensive and takes time to do properly.  Treatment done right extends the life of the record by slowing down or reversing damage to paper, bindings, and leather while at the same time being reversible and not a permanent alteration to an item.  Stay tuned for future conservation updates about free Negro registers and other interesting records within the Library of Virginia’s holdings.

The Library of Virginia welcomes donations to our general conservation fund in any amount.  Interested in sponsoring a particular book or item?  See suggestions on the Adopt Virginia History page.

-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 Executive Papers of Governor Thomas Jefferson, 1779-1781, have been named one of Virginia’s top ten endangered artifacts by the Virginia Association of Museums. The letters and manuscripts documenting Jefferson’s service as the second governor of Virginia address the challenges he faced during the Revolutionary War, the drafting of the Articles of Confederation, the negotiation of the boundaries of Virginia and her neighbors, and the dangers of the frontier. The papers are currently undergoing conservation treatments thanks in part to a $110, 000 grant received from Save America’s Treasures.  Watch as the video shows Leslie Courtois, Senior Conservator with Etherington Conservation Services, as she works to restore these valuable records in the Library of Virginia’s conservation labs. Thanks to Paige Neal for her script writing and narrating, to videographer Pierre Courtois, and to Audrey Johnson and Dale Neighbors of Special Collections for providing images. For more information on the collection and grant see the earlier blog post “Grant Allows Jefferson’s Papers to be Preserved.”

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.]

Today I leave the Library of Virginia and, hopefully, leave our state’s historic records in a little better shape than when I first came through the door. Like the archivists who worked here before me and those who will come after me, we try to save the building blocks of history, organize and preserve them, and make sure that they are accessible not only to visiting scholars but also to the citizens of this state and those who live around this country with roots deep in the soil of the commonwealth’s history.

I once heard a career counselor say that a job is what you do and the things you are passionate about become hobbies. I have been fortunate enough to do for nearly six years what most people could never dream of – having a job that is a passion and a passion that is a job. It has been an honor to work here and I am so sad to leave the Library of Virginia and my wonderful, dedicated co-workers and supervisors.

Yesterday the expertly-conserved pages of the Smith family Bible landed on my desk. This afternoon I’ll put them in a folder and reunite them with the chancery court case of which they have been a part for more than 100 years. And then I will clear my desk and walk out the doors of the Library of Virginia one last time. The caretakers come and go; the records and the institution remain.

Goodbye everyone.

-Dale Dulaney, Former Local Records Archival Assistant

In case you missed it, the Library of Virginia’s conservation of the gubernatorial papers of Thomas Jefferson was featured in Style Weekly. The letters and manuscripts documenting Jefferson’s service as the second governor of Virginia are being conserved thanks to a $110,000 grant from Save America’s Treasures. For more information on the collection and the grant see an earlier blog post about it here.

-Dale Dulaney, Local Records Archival Assistant

 

In 1996, Samuel Cooper, circuit court clerk of Accomack County, contacted the Library of Virginia about a large amount of county records he found in the attic of the clerk’s office.  He requested assistance from LVA to determine their value, with the possibility of transferring them to LVA.  A team of archivists travelled to Accomack County expecting to examine only a few boxes of old court papers.  After climbing through the narrow opening of the office ceiling, they discovered a treasure trove of court records dating from the late 1600s to the early 1700s.  Unfortunately, due to the poor environmental and storage conditions the records were in extremely fragile condition. Approximately 50 cubic feet of county records were transferred to the Library of Virginia where they were stabilized.

During the course of several years we examined these records to determine what they were and whether they could be recovered through conservation.  The examination revealed that the records were primarily wills, deeds, fiduciary records, judgments, and chancery suits dated from the colonial era of Accomack County.  Regrettably, the vast majority of these records are unsalvageable.  Victims of heat, humidity, and insects, they can never be recovered. (images above)  Fortunately we were able to identify a few gems that could be restored.  They include tobacco plant censuses, 1728-1729, tithable lists, 1738-1769, and oaths of allegiance, 1757-1758.  All have been expertly repaired by LVA’s in-house conservation lab with funding from the Circuit Court Records Preservation (CCRP) program.  Additional Accomack County court records recovered from the attic will be conserved in the near future.

This extraordinary conservation effort is made possible by funding provided through the CCRP, a part of the Library of Virginia’s Local Records Services Branch.  Since 1992, nearly 1000 records preservation grants totaling more than $15 million have been awarded to Virginia’s circuit court clerks’ offices. CCRP made possible the processing  and preservation of more than 16,000 boxes of Virginia’s local records, the posting of more than 5,000,000 digital images online, and the creation and storage of  more than 350,000 reels of security microfilm in the LVA vault.

 -Greg Crawford, Local Records Manager, and Carl Childs, Local Records Director

The Library of Virginia recently received a highly competitive Save America’s Treasures grant in the amount of $110,000 for the conservation of the gubernatorial papers of Thomas Jefferson.

The correspondence, letters, and documents pertaining to Thomas Jefferson’s service as the second governor of Virginia bring to life the daily challenges faced by him and other leaders during the Revolutionary War, while drafting the Articles of Confederation, and when addressing frontier relations. The list of Jefferson’s correspondents in the collection reads like a who’s who of American history and includes John Jay, James Madison, Baron Frederick von Steuben, John Paul Jones, George Rogers Clark, among other notables. The collection consists of 1,992 manuscript pages, and three letterbooks. This Save America’s Treasures grant will facilitate the preservation and digitization of the entire collection, ensuring public access to these valuable materials.

 This will be the second time these particular documents will go through a preservation process. In the 1930s, The Library of Virginia (then the Virginia State Library) partnered with William J. Barrow, a pioneer in conservation practices. Barrow and his Richmond-based company began work on colonial- and revolutionary-era records held by the archives utilizing his new laminating technique. This new method, which used cellulose acetate film, was widely accepted as a stable and effective means of preserving documents. Within a few decades, however, archivists and librarians discovered that documents which had been laminated or “barrowed” were becoming unstable with the cellulose acetate laminating film’s deterioration. Documents and volumes suffering the worst effects emitted a strong vinegar-like odor, indicating a chemical reaction was taking place.

 Left intact, the lamination on the Jefferson papers will continue to degrade, eventually buckling and warping the pages in the collection. Despite the deteriorating laminating film, most of the Jefferson papers currently appear to be in stable condition within the laminate. Their current stability makes it all the more important to begin the conservation process now before any long term damage takes place.

 Following the removal of the cellulose acetate laminating material, the documents will be cleaned and de-acidified then repaired as needed to restore them to their original condition. Repairs to the manuscripts will include mending tears and breaks.

 The executive papers and letterbooks of Governor Thomas Jefferson, 1779-1781, contain a number of folio items that were split by the Barrow Laboratory in order to facilitate the lamination process – these folios will be restored to their original appearance. Additionally, wax seals removed during the lamination process will be reattached to the documents.

 The grant will also provide greater access to the documents. In the 1990s the Library’s Digital Library Project digitized the microfilm copy of the Jefferson Papers and attached the image to a very skeletal catalog record. These catalog records have already begun to be enhanced with further subject headings. New scans will be created from the originals since many of the microfilm images were of poor quality. The new digital images will be available online.

 The Library was one of 61 recipients out of a pool of several hundred applicants for this funding. The grants are made in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and Save America’s Treasures private partner, the National Trust for Historic Preservation.