By: Katherine Elliott, Pub. 1967, Reprinted 2016, 178 pages, Index, ISBN #0-89308-377-1. Lunenburg County was created in 1746 out of Brunswick County, VA. The earliest records in Lunenburg County cover this entire area. The records included in this volume have been abstracted from wills and administrations found in the back of Deed Book I and Will Book I & II. Because some of the early records of Lunenburg County do not seem to have been preserved, the compilers have included in this volume some 20 pages of records abstracted from ORDER BOOK 1-6. These notes from the order books give names of deceased persons not of record in the will books, and names of orphans and other notes pertaining to the period covered in Volumes 1 and 2 of these reprints. Also found is a listing of marriages taken from Deed Books and other vital records, as well as apprenticeships, guardianship and much other valuable data important to the person searching this area of Virginia. There are more than 2,200 names of persons found in the above records listed in the full-name index.

Lunenburg County in southeastern Virginia was created from Brunswick County in 1746. The wills abstracted for this volume, shortly before the compiler's death, embrace all of those recorded in Lunenburg County from its formation through 1825. Most of the original wills were recorded in the county's official Will Books; however, Mr. Bell also discovered some early wills in county deed books as well as in circuit court records. Each abstract typically provides the following information: the name of the testator, his date of death and the date of probate, the names of the surviving spouse, children, or grandchildren, and the names of the executor(s) and witnesses. Mr. Bell also gives the page reference to the Lunenburg County Will Book where the original will may be found. The complete name index at the back of the volume, which was prepared by the Virginia Book Company following Mr. Bell's death, refers to some 7,000 persons in all.

Cumberland Parish was coextensive with Lunenburg County from its inception in 1745, and Mr. Bell's history of the parish and transcription of its oldest vestry book are of the first importance. The vestry book itself is replete with records of birth, baptism, marriage, and death, as well as an abundance of land transactions. To this, Mr. Bell has added extensive genealogical sketches of families who furnished vestrymen to Cumberland Parish.

Recounts the events surrounding the dramatic post-Civil War trial of a young African American sawmill hand who was accused of ax murdering a white woman on her Virginia farmyard and who implicated three other women in the crime.

The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry is the story of an expanding frontier. Richard Beeman offers a lively and well-written account of the creation of bonds of community among the farmers who settled Lunenburg Country, far to the south and west of Virginia's center of political and economic activity. Beeman's view of the nature of community provides an important dynamic model of the transmission of culture from older, more settled regions of Virginia to the southern frontier. He describes how the southern frontier was influenced by those staples of American historical development: opportunity, mobility, democracy, and ethnic pluralism; and he shows how the county evolved socially, culturally, and economically to become distinctly southern.