The Library of Virginia houses an extensive collection of vital records, including birth and death records, 1853-1896, and marriage records, 1853-1935. Genealogists and family historians…
As a Library of Virginia volunteer, researching the Dictionary of Virginia Biography (DVB) has taken me into the lives of worthy but heretofore relatively unremarked,…
Virginia’s marriage license requirements recently made the national news, and the state’s complicated history with racial classification is part of that conversation. Various records held…
Cohabitation registers are among the most important genealogical resources for African-Americans attempting to connect their family lines back through the murky past to their enslaved…
Portsmouth, Virginia, occupied by the Union army, was the scene of a wedding in November 1863. The happy couple was Charles “Charley” Butler, a private…
Before the Commonwealth of Virginia began officially recording vital statistics in 1853, many people recorded the births, deaths, and marriages in their families in the…
The conservation of the original pages of the Henry County Cohabitation Register has recently been completed. Previously, only a poorly and confusingly microfilmed version of this…
The Library of Virginia has completed the digitization and transcription of the last of the cohabitation registers in its possession, the Henry County Cohabitation Register, 1866.…
The Library of Virginia is pleased to announce the addition of Scott County and Washington County to the cohabitation register digitization project. This project, via the Virginia…
The Library of Virginia is pleased to announce the addition of Surry County to the cohabitation register digitization project. This project, via the Virginia Memory website, aims to…
The Library of Virginia is pleased to announce the addition of records from Fluvanna, Goochland, and Montgomery Counties to the cohabitation register digitization project. This project,…
Guest contributor Tricia Noel joins us to share an interesting discovery left by an anonymous artist on some New Kent County church records. Although they…
Death records provide familial information to genealogists, statistical information for researchers, and an occasional chuckle for archivists. My morbid fascination with death registers paid off…