Recently I worked on a project that involved a family in Augusta County, Virginia. It turns out this family was part of a larger group of Germans who settled in the area from Pennsylvania. They got there around the end of the 1790s, maybe earlier, and ended up staying in the area for several generations.
I was really pleased to find that these German settlers started a church in the area and there I found some wonderful records that actually gave me birth dates for children born in the late 1700s and early 1800s. It made me wish every area had been settled by religious Germans who believed in recording baptism and birth dates for all their children.
Now let me just say however, that it would have been even nicer when the child's baptism was recorded that they ALWAYS recorded the names of both parents. It makes it a little difficult to figure out which children belong to the family you're researching when there were two men in the area with the same first and last name and the only parents' name listed on the baptism was that of the father.
Learning about all the different records available for Virginia is one of the many things I hope to do as I work my way towards the accreditation process. I think I mentioned in a post from some time last year that I hoped to become accredited in the Mid-south region of the United States. After working two and sometimes three jobs at a time for the past year I have finally settled down to one full-time job and hope to pick up where my good intentions left off and continue the process. I think this blog can become a great vehicle for sharing what I learn and so I hope to do that on a more frequent basis. :-)
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