A question has arisen about the surviving records of colonial governors.

 

Alas, almost all of the executive archive of the colony was lost during
the American Revolution. During the twentieth century the Virginia State
Library (now the Library of Virginia) published the incomplete journals
of the governor's executive Council, which H. R. McIlwaine and others
edited. The originals of most or all of those journals are in London.

 

There is a small collection of miscellaneous petitions and other
documents that somehow survived the destruction of the bulk of the
colonial executive archive. It is in Record Group 1 at the Library of
Virginia. The documents are filed chronologically and also have recently
been catalogued individually and appear when a name associated with one
of them is searched on the Library's online catalog.

 

The letters that the governors sent to the Board of Trade, to the bishop
of London, and to the colonial secretary survive in London and have been
filmed by the Virginia Colonial Records Project. The Library of
Virginia's Web site has an index to the survey reports that describe the
documents in the nearly 1,000 reels of microfilm and can be searched by
personal name and ship name. Governors were not required to send to
London documents such as local trials of slaves, and the almost never
did.

 

Brent Tarter

The Library of Virginia

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Please visit the Library of Virginia's Web site at
http://www.lva.virginia.gov

 


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