Deed and will books typically contain records of land transactions plus leases, mortgages, bills of sale, slave manumissions, powers of attorney, estate settlements, and more. Deed and will books are a main staple in genealogy research to determine family relationships. This volume contains entries from (old) Rappahannock County Part 1, 1656-1664 beginning on page 1 and ending on page 180, February 4, 1656 through July 1, 1662. Originally published in 1989. Reprinted 2016.

The forgotten stories of America maroons—wilderness settlers evading discovery after escaping slavery Over more than two centuries men, women, and children escaped from slavery to make the Southern wilderness their home. They hid in the mountains of Virginia and the low swamps of South Carolina; they stayed in the neighborhood or paddled their way to secluded places; they buried themselves underground or built comfortable settlements. Known as maroons, they lived on their own or set up communities in swamps or other areas where they were not likely to be discovered. Although well-known, feared, celebrated or demonized at the time, the maroons whose stories are the subject of this book have been forgotten, overlooked by academic research that has focused on the Caribbean and Latin America. Who the American maroons were, what led them to choose this way of life over alternatives, what forms of marronage they created, what their individual and collective lives were like, how they organized themselves to survive, and how their particular story fits into the larger narrative of slave resistance are questions that this book seeks to answer. To survive, the American maroons reinvented themselves, defied slave society, enforced their own definition of freedom and dared create their own alternative to what the country had delineated as being black men and women’s proper place. Audacious, self-confident, autonomous, sometimes self-sufficient, always self-governing; their very existence was a repudiation of the basic tenets of slavery.

Deed books typically contain records of land transactions plus leases, mortgages, bills of sale, slave manumissions, and powers of attorney. Deed books are a main staple in genealogy research to determine family relationships. This volume contains entries from (old) Rappahannock County Deed Book 7, 1682-1686 beginning on page 1 and ending on page 225 for Courts held May 24, 1681 through March 3, 1685/6. Originally published in 1990. Reprinted 2016