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Inside the Great House explores the nature of family life and kinship in planter households of the Chesapeake during the eighteenth century—a pivotal era in the history of the American family. Drawing on a wide assortment of personal documents—among them wills, inventories, diaries, family letters, memoirs, and autobiographies—as well as on the insights of such disciplines as psychology, demography, and anthropology, Daniel Blake Smith examines family values and behavior in a plantation society. Focusing on the emotional texture of the household, he probes deeply into personal values and relationships within the family and the surrounding circle of kin. Childrearing practices, male-fem...
Inasmuch as Nansemond County's official records were totally destroyed by fires in 1734, 1779, and 1866, the work at hand, originally published in 1963 and itself now quite scarce, represents a valiant effort to reconstruct something of Nansemond's genealogical heritage from the records of its surrounding counties. The core of the book consists of the contents of nearly 100 Bibles arranged alphabetically according to the surname of the book's owner, and, thereunder, in progressions of marriages, births, and deaths. In all, more than 1,000 mostly 18th- and 19th-century inhabitants of Suffolk and Nansemond are here rescued from obscurity and further made accessible in the index to Bible records at the back. Also includes transcriptions of marriage records and several other miscellaneous lists.
In 1863 Confederate forces confronted the Union garrison at Suffolk Virginia, and an exhausting and deadly campaign followed. Wills (history and philosophy, U. of Virginia-Wise) focuses on how the ordinary people of the region responded to the war. He finds that many remained devoted to the Confederate cause, while others found the demands too difficult and opted in a number of ways not to carry them any longer. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
This is an unusual and challenging study of the 'inner world' of the Virginia gentry during Jefferson's lifetime. It argues that, in the years after the Revolution, the gentry turned away from public life into the privacy of their homes and families. A new, sentimental religion agreed that the world was filled with woe and advised detachment from it in preparation for a better one to come. Notions of success, likewise, offered little cheer, as men and women reluctantly accepted the individualistic proposition that their destinies were in their own hands. Neither religion nor success assured earthly happiness; instead, Virginians sought their salvation in love. There, in the family and in feeling, men and women broke through the eighteenth-century's emotional restraint to pursue, but not always to find, the happiness they believed awaited them.
Since Williamsburg was the site of a colonial chancery court, the town retained copies of depositions, court orders, and wills from various Virginia counties. Although most of the early records were destroyed in various fires, all the wills of the chancery court had already been abstracted, and it is these will abstracts which comprise this volume. Williamsburg Wills consists of abstracts of 350 wills from the chancery court, containing information not to be found anywhere else. Arranged alphabetically according to the name of the testator, the abstracts, typically, furnish the date of the will and the date of probate, the name of the county, and the names, with relationships, of all heirs.
A multifaceted portrait of the early American republic as examined through the lens of the Burr Conspiracy explores the political and cultural forces that influenced public perception and how in spite of vague and conflicting evidence, the former Vice President was arrested and tried for treason. --Publisher.