The Family Historian

Mary Alice Dell

 

 

Time Travel to Colonial Virginia

 

 

Ever wish you had a Time Travel machine and could visit a different period?  I recently felt as though we had done that, as my husband and I spent three weeks in Virginia delving into the colonial records of our ancestors.  Despite the destruction of court house records by the British during the Revolutionary and 1812 Wars, Yankees during the Civil War, and fires of other causes during peaceful times, an amazing number of county records still exist.  It is rare that all the records of a county were destroyed.  Careful scrutiny of those that did survive often permits a genealogist to trace a family line. 

 

The 400^th celebration of the founding of Jamestown, the first successful English settlement in America, has prompted a proliferation of published materials about those early days as well as crowds of tourists to Virginia.  It has stimulated the interest of family historians in locating a colonial ancestor.  Doing genealogical research in the colonial period differs as much from that of the 18^th and 19^th century research as those periods do from the 20^th century.  To be successful you need to know what records to look for in each period and in each location.

 

Virginia, unlike early New England, did not have town records of the birth, marriage and death. The Pilgrims began keeping records almost as soon as they placed their feet on the shore.   Few early Virginia parish church records are extant, so tracing early Virginia ancestors is mostly done though land and court records.

 

To be able to correctly interpret these legal records, it is necessary to become familiar with English laws and legal terms of that time period.  The age when a male or female was considered of legal age differs from time to time.  The law of primogeniture, by which the eldest son inherited two-thirds and the widow one third, prevailed until 1786, if there was no will.  Upon the widow’s death, the eldest son also inherited her share. The dower rights of widows, and legal rights of women in general, were not always the same in the colonial period as they were after the Revolutionary War and laws differed from state to state.

 

Just keeping up with who married who in colonial times is another challenge.  There was hardly a need for divorces, as few marriages survived the early death of one spouse or the other. Upon the death of a spouse, the survivor usually remarried within weeks (frequently before the estate of the man was settled).  A widow needed someone to provide for her and her young children; and a man who lost his wife had to have some one to take care of his minor children.  Survival, not romance, sparked many marriages and it is not unusual to find a man or woman married three or four times. 

 

Fortunately, early county clerks frequently identified a woman with her current married name and also as the widow of another man.  We found that the case in early 1700s in Northumberland County VA when the clerk identified Mary Linsfield, now married to Thomas Knight as the “the widow of Robert Sharpe”.  She was so identified, despite the fact, that an earlier court record in 1655 had identified this same woman as Mrs. Mary Walker, “the recent widow of Robert Sharpe”.  Despite the lack of marriage records, it was possible to prove that Mary Linsfield (other land records confirmed that was her maiden name) had three husbands with surnames Sharp, Walker, and Knight.  

 

Thomas Knight, Mary’s third husband, helped our research, by leaving land in his will of 1706 to Mary’s three grandchildren, Linsfield, John and Mary Sharpe.  Of course, we still needed to learn the names of the father and mother of these children. .

 

In the Northumberland County records of the late 1660’s, we found only one Sharpe. Land had been sold by John and Elizabeth Sharpe.  This gave us the probable name of the son of Mary Linsfield Sharpe Walker Knight and the parents of her three grandchildren.

 

Other court records revealed that Mary Sharpe (the granddaughter) in 1714 had been “bound out until age 18” and that she was the daughter of Elizabeth Jennison. Apparently John Sharpe’s widow had remarried.  It was customary in that time to make arrangements for a deceased man’s children (who were considered orphans until legal age even if they had surviving mothers) to be trained in a trade or educated under the supervision of a male guardian.     

 

Later records revealed the given name of the wife of grandson Linsfield Sharpe as being Frances; and his will of 1758, probated in St. George County VA, named his daughter Sarah as the wife of Thomas Burbridge. Thomas was one of my Revolutionary War patriots to whom I had already proven my line. 

 

So, thanks to the surviving land and court records of Northumberland and King George Counties, we were able to prove back three more generations in the colonial period.   Our job was made easier as the information in the deeds and court house minutes had been extracted from the original county book and published by some of those dedicated genealogists who spend hours deciphering the handwriting of our ancestors. We did not have time to visit the two counties to personally inspect the original records to make sure there were no errors or omissions 

 

The next step, now that we have exited from our Time Machine, is to examine microfilmed copies of the original court house records. Extractors sometimes omit details or names.  These will be ordered from the Library of Virginia through inter-library loan when we return to Boerne. Such is the exciting life of a family research detective. 

 

To learn more about the Genealogical Society of Kendall County and the Boerne Area Historical Preservation Society attend the Sept 8 GSKC meeting, 10 a.m. Boerne Library.

 

Published in the Boerne Star & Recorder August 24, 2007 and reprinted here with their permission.