More than a half-century ago, C. G. Chamberlayne, under the sponsorship of the Virginia State Library, transcribed, edited, and indexed a number of original Virginia parish vestry books, four of which are reprinted here. While the dates of coverage and lengths of the volumes vary, they are nonetheless similar in terms of scope and content. Each volume contains the oldest known records pertaining to that parish, in most cases beginning only a few years following the parish's date of formation. Mr. Chamberlayne begins each vestry book with an Introduction that pieces together the formation of the parish and important milestones in its history from published and original sources. Facsimilies of pages from the original vestry books, maps, and photographs help to put each volume into greater context, moreover. Appended to the vestry books are brief lists of the various parish ministers, with an indication of their earliest date of service as found in the records. The transcriptions themselves, ranging from about 250 to more than 600 pages of text, relate to the following issues growing out of the business affairs of colonial parish vestries; namely, payments to persons for services rendered to the parish, oaths and lists of oath-takers, news of the arrival of ministers, the appointment of church wardens, issues related to indentured servants, lists of tithables, payment of salaries and other obligations, the formation of parish precincts with the names of the families apportioned therein, the warding of children, and so on. In each case, these four scarce collections of colonial church records establish the existence of thousands of Virginia inhabitants, each of whom is easily found in the index or indexes at the back of the book.

The middle chapters of this book are given over to Wilkes County genealogy and biography, with chapters on the buyers and sellers of lots and the early settlers of the county. The work as a whole is crowded with references to ministers, officials, teachers, and soldiers, so much so that an index of more than 2,000 entries was created by Mrs. Hays to encompass them.

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The Lewis Family of Warner Hall was perhaps the most influential family in Gloucester County, Virginia, during the colonial period. The subject of a widely respected family history by Merrow Edgerton Sorley, originally published in 1935 and reprinted by the Genealogical Publishing Co., the Lewises of Warner Hall and their descendants have made notable contributions to Virginia and the nation. Since the original publication of Sorley's Lewis of Warner Hall, a debate has raged over the identity of the family's immigrant ancestor, whom Sorley presumed to be one ROBERT LEWIS of Wales. It was left to Mrs. Moses to show conclusively that Sorley was wrong and that the true immigrant ancestor of the Lewises of Warner Hall was JOHN LEWIS, who settled at Totopotomoys Creek in Gloucester County, Virginia on July l, 1653. In her vitally important little book The Welsh Lineage of John Lewis (1592-1657), originally published in 1984, Mrs. Moses traces back the Welsh side of the Lewis family for three generations in the vicinity of its ancestral home in Llangatock, Breconshire, and also resolves a number of issues surrounding the authenticity of the family coat-of-arms.

While in London in 1705, Robert Beverley wrote and published The History and Present State of Virginia, one of the earliest printed English-language histories about North America by an author born there. Like his brother-in-law William Byrd II, Beverley was a scion of Virginia's planter elite, personally ambitious and at odds with royal governors in the colony. As a native-born American--most famously claiming "I am an Indian--he provided English readers with the first thoroughgoing account of the province's past, natural history, Indians, and current politics and society. In this new edition, Susan Scott Parrish situates Beverley and his History in the context of the metropolitan-provincial political and cultural issues of his day and explores the many contradictions embedded in his narrative. Parrish's introduction and the accompanying annotation, along with a fresh transcription of the 1705 publication and a more comprehensive comparison of emendations in the 1722 edition, will open Beverley's History to new, twenty-first-century readings by students of transatlantic history, colonialism, natural science, literature, and ethnohistory.

This book traces the descendents of Thomas Hall and Margery Claxon as they moved westward from Gloucester County to Patrick County, Virginia, and ultimately to Champaign County, Ohio.