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

Editor’s Note: Guest contributor Brent Tarter offers the following post, pointing out some interesting finds made by the creators of the Library of Virginia’s Union or Secession exhibition.

During Virginia’s secession crisis in the winter and spring of 1860-1861, men and women across the state wrote to Governor John Letcher to comment on public affairs. They wrote to tell the governor what to do, to ask for help, to offer advice and assistance, or to get something off their chests. While researching in preparation for the Library of Virginia’s exhibition, Union or Secession: Virginians Decide , we spent time looking through the letters received by Governor Letcher. Like the records of every Virginia governor since 1776, the letters are preserved in Record Group 3 of the state’s archives in the Library of Virginia. The Governor’s Office records are an extremely rich source for the beliefs and words of ordinary Virginians.

During 1860 and 1861 the governor received letters from men and women in every part of the state who expressed every possible opinion and political allegiance. “I would like to Know from you what is to prevent me from Voting for Lincoln,” Giles County resident John M. Smith asked Governor Letcher in September 1860. “As he is the man I prefer. the reason of this letter is that there is a great deal of threatning on the part of Slave holders in regard to poor men excerciseng the elective franchise.” It is unlikely that Smith was able to vote for Abraham Lincoln on election day, 6 November 1860. Although 1,929 Virginia men voted for Lincoln (most of them in the northwestern counties and in the upper Potomac River Valley), there is no record of any of those votes being cast in Giles County.

At the beginning of the crisis, most men and women in Virginia opposed secession, and it was not until April 1861 when the people of the state had to decide whether to fight with or against the United States that a majority favored secession.  In April 1861, Sarah A. Logan, of Goochland County, asked the governor to “Accept my services for my State. I have no son old enough, and my husband is one of the ‘homeguard’ so I wish with the assistance of my daughters to do something—anything. Hearing that red flannel shirts or jackets are needed, I will make as many as you can send me the materials for,— say five hundred or a thousand.” Probably referring to the more than fifty enslaved laborers on her family’s plantation, she assured the governor that “I can do it, as I have a large force at my command.”

The words of enslaved Virginians appear in court records that are preserved in the governor’s papers, too. Many enslaved people correctly foresaw that war would offer them new opportunities for freedom. According to testimony in a Mecklenburg County case, a slave named Sam made statements around his neighborhood that “from what I can find out, Old Lincoln is coming down the Mississippi river and will free every thing as he goes, and I think if we be pretty keen we will get our freedom too.” In May 1861, the county court convicted Sam of conspiring to make insurrection and sentenced him to be sold out of state, which the governor later commuted to forced labor on the public works, which likely meant Confederate defensive fortifications.

Virginia’s secession and the outbreak of war led to the creation of the new, free state of West Virginia. In May 1861, Robert Johnston, from Clarksburg, asked the governor to provide for the defense of politically divided western Virginia, explaining that in the west, “our intercourse is almost entirely with the West and the North, we have none with the Central and eastern portions of Virginia. We are not Slaveholders, many of us are of Northern birth, We read almost exclusively Northern newspapers and books, and listen to Northern preachers.”

Like a majority of Virginians, Governor Letcher (read his biography here) opposed secession until the middle of April 1861, and like most white Virginians in the east supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. His mail can be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in this period of Virginia’s history.  Learn more about this collection at the Library of Virginia in the Guide to the Executive Papers of Governor John Letcher, 1859-1863 (Accession 36787). 

 -Brent Tarter, founding editor of the Dictionary of Virginia Biography

Library of Virginia (LVA) staff, partners, and dignitaries gathered at the Goochland County courthouse Thursday to celebrate a milestone in a project that aims to put Virginia’s historic chancery court documents online.

The Goochland County Chancery Causes include the five millionth chancery image scanned by the Library of Virginia’s innovative Circuit Court Records Preservation Program. The records are the latest local records to be processed, indexed and digitally reformatted. “It’s an opportunity to celebrate what we’ve accomplished as a team,” said Carl Childs, Local Records Services Director. “It really is a team effort. It takes many different areas of the LVA working closely with the staff at the courthouses to complete these projects.”

The chancery digitization project began in 2005 with a pilot program in Fauquier County and now includes collections from 47 Virginia localities. Each of Virginia’s circuit courts created chancery records that contain considerable historical and genealogical information. Because these records rely so heavily on testimony from witnesses, they offer a unique glimpse into the lives of Virginians from the early 18th century to the eve of the First World War. A broad spectrum of citizens—rich and poor, black and white, slave and free—appear in the records. Chancery cases are a valuable source of local, state, social, and legal history and serve as a primary source for understanding local history.  They show the growth of business and industry in a locality, from taverns and churches to mines and creameries. Childs hopes that the improved access will allow researchers to begin comparative studies of different localities within Virginia.

Among the 119,000 images scanned from the Goochland collection are ones related to disputes over land, wills, divorces, debts, and business issues. The names of slaves suing for their freedom, of the descendants of the Huguenot settlers of Manakin-Towne, of planters, millers, coal miners, church leaders, and ordinary citizens appear in the records. Carefully-drawn plats sometimes illustrate cases involving disputed property lines and mining rights. Ornate marriage certificates and licenses accompany some divorce suits. Broadsides advertise the auction of farms and businesses describing the land and its features or the business and its equipment. This wealth of information is available from any Internet connected computer.

Childs said digitization has many advantages for users compared to microfilm including accommodating multiple users simultaneously, the power to instantly deliver images to users both nationally and internationally, and the ability to capture color — especially useful with plats and maps. “It’s not just genealogists and historians using these records,” Childs said. “There’s title research going on and lawyers using them. There’s a present-day business use going on and we felt like we needed a better product.”

Visit the Chancery Records Index to view the Goochland County collection and those of other available Virginia localities.