Genealogy Resources at the Library of Virginia

The city of Richmond, Virginia, dates to the early 17^th century and has been crucial to the development of the Colony of Virginia, the Revolutionary War, and the Civil War. It became the capital of the commonwealth in 1780. The city is situated on a high hill overlooking the falls of the James River.

"Richmond, from a hill above the waterworks" circa 1834
Engraved by W J Bennett from a painting by G Cooke
Image courtesy of Wikipedia

The Library of Virginia, located in Richmond, was founded by the Virginia General Assembly in 1823. It is now the library agency of the Commonwealth of Virginia and is the archival and reference library for the state. It houses what many believe to be the most comprehensive collection of materials about Virginia government, history and culture. According to Wikipedia, its research collection includes “808,500 bound volumes; 678,790 public documents; 410,330 mircoforms, including 46,684 reels of microfilmed newspapers; 308,900 photographs and other pictorial materials; 101.8 million manuscript items and records; and several hundred thousand prints, broadsides and newspapers.”

Library of Virginia courtesy of the library's website

I am fortunate; I live two hours north of Richmond and have been able to make several trips to the library. I found the Visitor’s Guide to be extremely helpful in planning my first visit to an unknown library. I also called ahead and received great assistance in optimizing my research agenda. 

If you cannot visit the library in person, don’t be alarmed. Much information is available online:

• Find It Virginia is the free access to a collection of Virginia databases
• Virginia Memory includes the library’s digital collections of newspapers, prints and photographs
• Virginia Heritage – a guide to the library’s manuscripts and archival collections

I use the library mostly when doing newspaper research, but I have also found copies of old family wills that have been helpful in making relationship connections between ancestors, such as Sue Adams described in a recent post. If you have branches of your family tree that lived in Virginia,* I hope you will take time to discover the research resources available at the Library of Virginia. And don't forget to peek at the Chancery Court records. You'll find your Virginia ancestors were a litigious lot and the information in those records can provide a wealth of "color" about a person -- some even include descriptions of their character and not always in a good way.

I'm using #WWGenealogy when tweeting about this collaboration project on Twitter (@TweetTRnT).

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* Don't forget Virginia was once a vast portion of what is now the United States;  records from that area that are now other states are sometimes found in the library.

"Pocahontas" Alias Metoaka and Her Descendants

Since I'm from the oldest surviving English colony in the United States, I thought I'd focus this month on one of the most famous Native Americans from Virginia: Pocahontas. She had one son but her descendants now number in the tens of thousands. There are several ancestor associations, which people may join if they can prove their descent from Pocahontas.

Rev. James Mitchell is my 4X great grand uncle

My relationship to Pocahontas is very tortuous and certainly wouldn't gain me admission to any Pocahontas ancestor association were I to want to join. I find it interesting nonetheless as every elementary school history book I was required to use included a chapter on her. I am from Virginia after all!

Matoaka "Pocahontas" also known as Rebecca Rolfe, engraving by 

Simon van de Passe; courtesy of Wikipedia

When I was researching her descendants, I discovered a wonderful old book on Google Play, Pocahantas and Her Descendants, written by Wyndam Robertson and published in 1887.  

The book included seven generations of Pocahontas descendants, including Wyndham Robertson (1803-1888) himself. Robertson included a delightful declaration of love by John Rolfe:

"Pocahontas…to whom my hartie and best thoughts are, and have long bin so entangled and inthralled in so intricate a laborinth, that I was even awearied to unwinde myselfe thereout." 

Wyndham Robertson, painting by Louis Mathieu Didier Guillaume; 

courtesy of Wikipedia

Robertson was the acting governor of Virginia from 1836 to 1837. As senior member of the Council of State, he was also Lt Governor when Governor Littleton Waller Tazewell resigned the office.  At the time the legislature elected the governor and it was controlled by the Whigs so Robertson was not returned to office in 1837. After his term was over he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates several times and was in that office during Virginia's struggles over secession from the Union. Robertson was a staunch Unionist and tried to prevent secession. 

When Abraham Lincoln made his call for troops on April 15, 1861, Wyndham Robertson became "zealously active in all measures in defense of his state." After the Civil War he served on the Committee of Nine, which sought Virginia's readmission into the Union. After long and faithful service to Virginia, he retired and wrote his genealogy book. He died on February 11, 1888, and is buried at Cobbs, Virginia.

He later said about his service to his state during the Civil War:

"And now, after twenty years of experience of yet unripened results, I have no regrets, nor repent a single act of my State, or myself, in these unhappy affairs -- welcoming the end of slavery, but still believing it would have been reached without the horrors of war."


And this is yet another reason I love old books so much -- not only are the subjects of the books fascinating so are their authors.

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Genealogy books are great references but should be considered just that a reference. They are not sources. Even experienced researchers make mistakes. And one of those mistakes put me on a trail that ended Pocahontas. For several months, I believed my sister-in-law descended from the Bermuda Tucker family based on a Tucker genealogy book that claimed her 6 times great grandfather's father was a Henry Tucker of Bermuda. But DNA has proved that the author confused several Henry Tuckers, who lived in Southampton County, Virginia, in the late 1600s. The Bermuda Tuckers married into the Randolph family,  one of the first families of Virginia, that do descend from Pocahontas, but my sister-in-law's Tucker line still deadens with Benjamin Tucker (1714-1799).