Week #25
As I countdown to the publication of Lineage, each week I’ll feature a geography and highlight at least one archive or library or other institution where I’ve been doing research on vernacular genealogy. I’ll post on my Instagram (@VernacularGenealogy), often more than one post, and also write it all up in this brief space.
This week it’s my home state of Virginia, and the Library of Virginia. The LVA has been doing remarkable digitizing project work for some time, including Virginia Untold on African American history and this Bible Records Digital Collection. I also follow their excellent series on the road trips taken for the Circuit Court Records Preservation Program and the invaluable Chancery Records Index. All of these absolutely essential for my research for Lineage and since, but also a model of active preservation and access work.
As I often do, I was just noodling around with samples from the LVA’s materials and decided to highlight the Newtons of 18th century Westmoreland County. Westmoreland is on Virginia’s Northern Neck, along the south side of the Potomac River. In 1753 Willoughby Newton Newtown of Westmoreland County, Virginia wrote the family history of marriage and children with his wife, Sarah Eskridge Newton, who had just died. He wrote this text where de described his late wife as “One of the Best of Wife’s and Mothers”–and another fragment about his father’s death in 1727–on two Bible pages which have been preserved as part of the LVA’s Bible Records Digital Collection.
The history of Bible pages as repositories for family history is one story; the detachment of those pages from the Bibles for preservation, as in the case of these at LVA, is another that I want to write more about.
But for now, the family histories associated with the Newtons are extensive and include the people and families enslaved by the Newtons. The invoice of Willoughby Newton’s estate, probated after he died in 1767, included dozens of people and families. Particularly striking given Willoughby’s comments about Sarah as wife and mother is the bracketed callout to Moll, and to her children. The inventory also brackets “Jenny’s children.” The sharply different status of these women as mothers, and the status of their children–free or enslaved depending on their mother– illustrates so much about Virginia. And it is poignant that these materials can be located and shared, given how much of early Virginia’s documentary history was lost, especially during the Civil War.
Next week, another Virginia site and family.