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In this volume Martha W. McCartney gives us a detailed look at the people associated with Jamestown from its founding in 1607 to 1800. Based on government records and private archives, it provides historical biographies of several distinct groups of people: Jamestown Island landowners, public officials such as council members and burgesses, Native-American leaders, and African Americans associated with Jamestown.It also covers more than a thousand people who did not own land on Jamestown Island but whose activities brought them to Virginia’s capital city, including individuals who appeared before the General Court, Quakers who were jailed on account of their religious beliefs, Indians seeking justice on various matters, and participants in the popular uprising known as Bacon’s Rebellion.Using an array of fascinating but little known sources, McCartney has carved out authoritative biographies and sketches of everyone in the public record associated with Virginia’s capital, from landowners to slaves; she has also enriched her text with a careful study of privately held papers, lending texture to the historical record while filling in little-known details about this very distinctive population.

This book brings together a variety of primary sources that inform the reader about the colony's earliest European inhabitants and the sparsely populated and fragile communities in which they lived, resulting in the most comprehensive collection of annotated biographical sketches yet published. From the earliest records relating to Virginia, we learn the basics about many of these original colonists: their origins, the names of the ships they sailed on, the names of the'hundreds'and'plantations'they inhabited, the names of their spouses and children, their occupations and their position in the colony, their relationships with fellow colonists and Indian neighbors, their living conditions as far as can be ascertained from documentary sources, their ownership of land, the dates and circumstances of their death, and a host of fascinating, sometimes incidental details about their personal lives, all gathered together in the handy format of a biographical dictionary. Maps provided here identify the sites at which Virginia's earliest plantations were located and enable genealogists and students of colonial history to link most of the more than 5,500 people included in this volume to the cultural landscape.

This is a collection of genealogical data from important name lists for Colonial Surry, which once encompassed almost the entire southern part of the state of Virginia (i.e., fourteen present-day Virginia counties). Noteworthy lists include Surry land grants, 1624-1740, and various Surry and Sussex censuses and marriage bonds.

This is the second of three volumes that will eventually comprise the fourth edition of the landmark'Adventurers of Purse and Person.'Individuals identified in the work must have been resident in Virginia during the period 1607-1624/25 or members of the Virginia Company of London in order to be designated'adventurers,'and it is their descendants alone who qualify for membership in one of the most distinguished hereditary societies in America, the Order of First Families of Virginia.'Adventurers of Purse and Person'is their story, a collection of genealogies of all adventurers with proven descents into the sixth generation.

Professor Wertenbaker here explains how the headright system, tobacco cultivation, and the importation of slave labor transformed the colony of Virginia from largely a society of yeoman farmers to a planter aristocracy. At the turn of the eighteenth century, however, most Virginia landowners were still self-sufficient small farmers holding a few hundred acres of land. This is borne out by the Rent Roll of Virginia, 1704-1705, a county-by-county breakdown of all landowners and their acreage in the Colony. The closest thing to a census of Virginia for the period, the Rent Roll identifies upwards of 7,000 Virginia landholders. The genealogical importance of this document, of course, cannot be overstated, so it is with much delight that we find it appended to Professor Wertenbaker's narrative. The remainder of the book relates how all of this would change.

This volume covers the lineage records of l,500 members new to the Society from 1953 to 1981. Generation by generation, descent is traced from the earliest immigrant ancestor to the l,500 members of the Society who joined between 1953 and 1981, the sole condition of membership in the Society being that the immigrant ancestor must have arrived in the Colonies between 1620 and 1700. Each of the lineage records contains the names of all ancestors in the direct line of descent from the original immigrant, each with dates of birth, marriage, and death. Readers should be advised that the term'Pilgrim'in the context of this book refers to travelers to all parts of the Colonies, not just New England. For the researcher's edification, we should mention here that the index contains about 28,000 names!