On behalf of the Mary Ball Washington Museum & Library in Lancaster, VA, we are pleased to announce the launching of an on-line, relational and searchable database for estate records from 1835-1865. This is the culmination of a three year project made possible by a matching grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. The goals were many, not the least of which was to identify every slave record to be found in the Estate Books for this period. (Some periods are missing). Over 3,000 entries regarding slaves were found within this set of records, which have never before been published. But there is much more to this database. Everything is keyed to one of the decedents: Heirs, marriages, inventories, accounts, chancery suits. These are not digitized images of the records, but abstracts of them all in a relational database. You can read more about it--and hopefully use it--here:

http://mbwm.org/estates.asp

There is something here for almost everyone. Some very interesting statistics are provided in the introduction, which you are encouraged to read.

Craig Kilby
Lancaster, VA
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