While examining Prince Edward County court records for chancery suits, former Local Records Archivist Catherine OBrion found a group of declarations to the justices of the peace of Prince Edward County.  The declarants were Revolutionary War veterans seeking to obtain pensions under an act of Congress passed on 7 June 1832. The applicants present detailed testimony of their time of service during the Revolutionary War. Information found in the declarations include date and location applicants entered into service, names of military companies they served in, names of military commanders they served under, names of fellow soldiers they served with, length of service, their ages, and their places of birth. The declarations also include affidavits from witnesses who could verify information provided by applicants.

The predominant portion of the declarations consists of narratives of the veterans’ tours of duty during the Revolutionary War.  William Hines, age 78, presented an account of his service under General George Rogers Clarke in present-day Kentucky.  Clarke’s army was pursuing Native Americans along the Ohio River.  Hines shared how, during the campaign, he was severely wounded by two musket balls which broke both bones of his right arm below the elbow.  Hines was personally assured by General Clarke that he would receive a pension.  William Worsham, age 80, presented an account of his service from the time the war began in 1775 to the British surrender at Yorktown. He mentions the burning of Norfolk, campaigns in North and South Carolina, skirmishes with Benedict Arnold, and clashes with Cornwallis during which Worsham was taken prisoner by the British.  William Scott, age 74, offers a humorous account of a prank a group of soldiers pulled on their superior officer, a Colonel Morgan, who was unpopular with his troops.  Scott shares that one night, “some persons disposed to shew [sic] their dislike for Colonel Morgan … broke his sword to the hilt, and shaved the main [sic] and tail of his horse.”  Morgan was so angry he refused to grant his troops their discharge papers.

Prince Edward County (Va.) Declarations for Revolutionary War Pensions, 1832 (Barcode number 1202630) are open for research.

-Greg Crawford, Local Records Coordinator

Plat, 1780, Fluvanna Co. Chancery Cause 1812-007 William I. Stone vs. William Galt &c

The Library of Virginia is pleased to announce that the Accomack County chancery causes, 1727-1805, and Fluvanna County chancery causes, 1779-1882, are now available on the Chancery Records Index.  The Accomack County material consists of chancery suits recovered from court records found in the attic of the clerk’s office in 1996. Additional chancery from Accomack County will be added at a later date. The Fluvanna County chancery causes were separated from court records housed at the Library of Virginia. Additional Fluvanna County chancery records are available at the Circuit Court Clerk’s office.

A number of the Accomack County chancery causes for this date range concern the division of slaves. An example is Accomack County chancery cause 1799-019. This suit includes a report of a division of slaves (image # 7) among the heirs of William Taylor.  Accomack County chancery cause 1783-013 (image # 13) contains a September 1777 letter that references British losses at the Battle of Brandywine.  Accomack County chancery cause 1801-005 is a freedom suit filed by a slave named Mary claiming freedom on the basis of her mother’s Native American ancestry. She argues that her mother, Mall Cook, was “one of the native aboriginal Indians of this country” (image #2).

Transcript for Report of division of slaves, 1792

Transcript for D. Bowman letter, 20 September 1777

Transcript for Petition of Mary, 1801

 Fluvanna County chancery causes suits of interest include 1812-007, concerning title to lands of British subjects escheated by Act of the Commonwealth in 1779. Exhibits include a 1725 patent, a list of landowners in Fluvanna County in 1796, and multiple plats (image# 146).  Fluvanna County chancery cause 1807-004 contains information on a mercantile partnership at Old Ferry, a house at Point of Fork, business interests in Richmond and Petersburg, a schoolmaster to the Cary family in Fluvanna County, the mental health of an African American woman named Mary, and the murder of an enslaved man by another enslaved man. The defendant in this suit was David Ross, a prominent Virginia businessman and landowner. His answer to the complaint includes details about his business with his business partner in the town of Columbia in the 1790s and early 1800s (image # 8). Finally, Fluvanna County chancery cause 1841-006 includes an 1840 letter from Crawford County, Arkansas, to a person in Kentucky, describing farm land in Arkansas, unhappiness with the current President of the United States, and a loud celebration of the Fourth of July (Image # 33 and 34).

Transcript to Answer of David Ross, 1806

Transcript to David Shepherd letter, 5 July 1840

 For more information on these collections and to see additional suits of interests, see the EAD guides for Accomack County Chancery Causes, 1727-1805 and Fluvanna County Chancery Causes, 1779-1882.

 These localities join forty-eight counties and cities whose chancery causes have been digitally reformatted and made available through the Library’s innovative Circuit Court Records Preservation Program, which seeks to preserve the historic records of Virginia’s Circuit Courts. 

To date, The Library of Virginia has posted over 5.7 million digital chancery images. Additional localities are presently being scanned and will be posted in the coming months. However, because of reductions to the Library of Virginia’s budget in recent years, the pace of the agency’s digital chancery projects will necessarily proceed more slowly. Please know these projects remain a very high priority for the agency and it is hoped that the initiative can be resumed in full when the economy and the agency’s budget situation improve. Please see the Chancery Records Index for a listing of the available locality chancery collections.

-Vince Brooks, Senior Local Records Archivist & Gregory Crawford, Local Records Coordinator

Transcript of documents shown above.

Edward Houchins, a veteran of Captain Edmund Curd’s Company of Goochland Militia, petitioned the General Assembly on 10 December 1818, requesting an increase in his forty-dollar-a-year pension. According to the Louisa County resident, he was severely wounded in the arm at General Horatio Gates’s defeat at the Battle of Camden, South Carolina, in 1780. It was this very wound that allowed Houchins to successfully petition the Assembly in 1805 for his current pension. In the 1818 petition, Houchins complained of unusual pain from the lead ball that had become lodged in his arm thirty-eight years earlier. An affidavit from Richard Sandidge accompanying the petition asserts that he saw Houchins’s wife take a poultice of her husband’s arm, thereby producing the bullet. Upon further examination of the bullet, Sandidge determined that it contained pieces of bone from Houchins’s arm. As a result of this evidence, the General Assembly decided favorably on Houchins’s petition for an addition to his pension. Houchins later relocated to Mercer County, Kentucky, in 1821, collecting his pension until his death on 14 April 1846.

Edward Houchins’s petition is just one example of the more than twenty thousand legislative petitions included in the Library’s Legislative Petitions Online Database. According to a note filed with the 1818 petition, the affidavit of Richard Sandidge (containing the extracted projectile) was removed from the petition for State Librarian John P. Kennedy’s exhibition case on 13 May 1904. The affidavit was not returned to the petition file, and would probably have remained missing had item-level cataloguing of the Jamestown Exhibition Collection not been done in 2005. For reasons unknown, the affidavit ended up in this collection, stored in the Library of Virginia’s vault. The Report of the State Librarian, which lists the manuscripts exhibited by the Virginia State Library at the Jamestown Exposition of 1907, has no record of the document being used for this exhibit. While researching the affidavit, I decided to check the Legislative Petition Database to see if Edward Houchins ever petitioned the General Assembly for a pension. The search yielded the two petitions mentioned above. Unfortunately, microfilming of the Legislative Petitions Collection was completed in March 2001, well before the affidavit was rediscovered. The affidavit will remain in the LVA vault with the Jamestown Exhibit Papers, but a note has been included in the Petition Database to inform researchers of its existence.

-Craig Moore, State Records Appraisal Archivist