The boundaries of old Frederick County today encompasses 12 counties: Frederick, Clarke, Warren, Shenandoah, and Page counties in Virginia; and Jefferson, Berkeley, Morgan, Hampshire, Mineral, Hardy, and Grant counties in West Virginia. During the 1700s a land dispute between a Colonist and an Englishman developed into a lawsuit. The suit was between Jost Hite, the plantiff and Lord Thomas Fairfax, defendant. Fairfax claimed to inherit all of the country know as the Northern Neck from his father and maternal grandfather, Lord Thomas Culpeper. During the eighteen years of the court battle no land was legally disposed of, resulting in no legal land documents. This book is a comprehensive study of the settlers of old Frederick County, who they were, where they came from, and where they lived in the county, and where they went.

This extraordinary compilation, first published to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Hopewell [Friends] Monthly Meeting in 1934, is divided into two parts. The historical section is a broad survey of Hopewell Meeting from its origins nine years before the creation of Frederick County. Of far greater importance to genealogists, the documentary section encompasses 200 years of Quaker records: births, marriages, deaths, removals, disownments, and reinstatements, a good many of which cannot be found in public record offices. (For example, Virginia counties were not required to report to the state until 1825.) The vital records themselves have been supplemented by rare documents, letters, diaries, and other private records. Many thousands of individuals are identified in these records, the index to which runs 225 pages and contains thousands of entries.

This work contains abstracts of all wills and administrations recorded in Frederick County, Virginia between 1795 and 1816 and refers in total to some 5,000 persons. Not only are these records of value to the researcher because of Frederick County's frequent boundary changes, but the abstracts themselves are so replete with detail that each one forms a kind of "mini-genealogy."

"Vital data in this second revision of historical records have been gleaned from many private and public sources."--Preface.