Well, I'm back working on University, Court, and Slave in a serious way and thinking about Southampton County, Virginia -- because it's the site of the Nat Turner rebellion, which sets in motion UCS (as I affectionately call it). That reminded me that I've been meaning to look into the probate records for Southampton -- though this for a companion to the article Stephen Davis and I wrote on probate in Greene County, Alabama in the 1830s and 1840s. There are some nagging questions, like do other counties in this time show the same reverence for preserving property within the family that we found in Greene County? And are there as many -- or perhaps more? -- trusts as we found in Greene?
Now, what to my wondering eyes does appear, but the probated wills for Southampton from the 1740s to the 1880s! That is terrific. Thanks to the generosity of the Brantley Association, there's no need to travel up to Southampton (or Richmond -- I thought the records might be in the Virginia State Library in Richmond). And while I certainly enjoy visiting both of those places, nothing beats doing archival work from my desk, rather than in an actual archives. Though I hope to be back in Southampton soon to reprise my trip last August and to get my hands on some more Pork Avenue barbeque. Maybe I'll go there when I get the 1830s Southampton wills coded and analyzed....
Pretty freaking cool what's on the net, isn't it? This reminds me of one of my new favorite phrases, adapted from Sarah Palin: "scan, baby, scan." And it also reminds me of the ways that the work of genealogists is often of immense value to social and legal historians. Getting access to the records makes it a heck of a lot easier to analyze them, obviously -- and the genealogists' biographies of people often thought obscure is also of immense help. There's also an increasing premium on interpretation of data, now that collection of it has become so much easier.
The image is of the Southampton County courthouse in Cortland (once known as Jerusalem).
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