Northern Neck of Viginia Pioneeers, 1642-1675. In Six Volumes.

Description

Virginia’s Northern Neck is comprised of the present-day counties of Lancaster, Northumberland, Richmond, and Westmoreland. (The oldest records for Richmond County date from its origin as part of Old Rappahannock County.) The foremost authority on Northern Neck genealogy, Robert K. Headley, Jr., here presents us with a genealogical dictionary of the earliest settlers of the Northern Neck derived from a staggering database of 74,893 records. (In some cases, he has included records beyond 1675, especially when he was able to determine when an individual had died.) And what are those records? Records of debts, orders to pay debts, confessions to debts owed, sale of land or livestock, land disputes, powers of attorney, deeds of gift, wills, inventories, petitions for commission of administration, notices of going abroad, depositions in criminal or chancery cases, coroners inquests, judgment of age of servants, punishment of runaway servants, servants who had illegitimate children or who had injured their masters, verdicts of juries (including names of jurors), certificates to employ Indians, births of children, marriages and prenuptial agreements, mortgages, recordings of marks for livestock, and divisions of land.

In all, the six volumes contain upwards of 24,000 genealogical sketches. They are arranged alphabetically, and each fact cited therein includes the source of the information. While a minority of the entries are only a few lines long, they, nonetheless, place a pioneer in time and space. Most of the sketches, however, are paragraphs in length, and many are much longer. Here’s a sample entry:

DODMAN, John 2 – WC (1661-63); son of Jn. DODMAN 1 and Elizabeth DEATH (see Jn. DODMAN 1); wit., Jas. CUDWORTH of Newport in [Rhode] Island in the province of Providence, atty. of Wm. BENTON of Roade Island, merch., per virtue of attornyship dtd. 12 Sep 1661, discharge of Dan. HUTT of WC from all transactions, 11 Oct 1661 (WC Deeds Etc 1661-62:55 (53)); on jury that tried case of BUTLER vs. LETTSUM, 29 Apr 1663 (WCOB 1662-54:12) [Named as a son of Jn. & Eliz. (DEATH) DODMAN in the will of Rich. DEATH, Isle of Wight co., 3 Mar 1647 (Isle of Wight Will Book A:17)]

As Mr. Headley writes in the Introduction, there are “stories of great heroism and horrible cruelty, of financial disasters, of great successes, of vicious feuds, of husbands deserting wives and wives deserting husbands, of marriages, births, and funerals, of doctors, blacksmiths, carpenters, ministers, merchants, rogues, scoundrels, and above all planters. . . . Sometimes we see a slice of a person’s life—a few years and then nothing—and occasionally we can follow a person’s entire life from birth to death. . . .  At the very least, this work can provide a guide to locate records about an individual.”

In the Methodology section at the front of each volume, Mr. Headley explains the approach he took in compiling his database, as well as how he addressed the problems associated with 17^th-century spelling and name variants. Extensive appendices appear at the back each volume, covering the project’s sources, bibliography, list of abbreviations, name variants, and placenames. Each volume is fully indexed. The volumes may be purchased as a complete set or volume by volume, according to the following alphabetical sequence: Volume One, A-C; Volume Two, D-G; Volume Three, H-L; Volume Four, M-Q; Volume Five, R-T; and Volume Six, U-Z.