One summer years ago, as we ate our sandwiches from Chicken's at the foot of one of the statues in Capitol Square, Mick Nichols, who was then continuing his research on southside Va counties in the late 18th century (principally using county records), commented that although annual registrations were required by law, enforcement/compliance (gauged by the number of free negroes who bothered to register) seemed fairly lax in uneventful years but would suddenly spike at what appeared to be times of tension, such as the Gabriel conspiracy, or perhaps Saint Domingue, etc.  As you suggest and others have suggested, the pattern Nichols noticed might be similar to the one described for Cumberland in the 1850s.
  Related anecdote - in the early 70s when Connis Brown was running the local records program in its earlies years, Brown and his team focussed on recovering records and filming records without much provision for access to the records once they'd been brought to Richmond. Typically, in fact, the records in Richmond remained closed by order of the county clerks.  Mick Nichols had done his dissertation research in several southside counties _before_ the advent of the local records program, and when he came back to extend his work into the latter part of the 18th century suddenly confronted reading room personnel telling him the records were closed by order of the county clerks.  So he made a few phone calls and presto, the clerks gave him the necessary permission. The research climate at VSL was different back in the early 70s - back before the "&A" much less the current name - and any comeuppance to the bureaucratic arrogance gave us heart.
Jon Kukla
--------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From:         John Hopewell <[log in to unmask]>
Date:         Tue, 17 Jul 2001 17:35:22 -0400
>As an archivist in local records at The Library of Virginia, recently I
>have been sorting through the loose court records of Cumberland County. In the decade of the 1850s, Free Negro Registration "passes" routinely number one or two a month. Today while sorting through the records for 1857, suddenly there are 13 for January, 52 for February, 15 for March and 10 for April. Then it's back to 1 for May, none for June, 2 for July. . . . . .


--
Jon Kukla ....................... Executive Vice-President and CEO
1250 Red Hill Road ........ Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation
Brookneal, VA 24528 .... www.redhill.org .... 804 376-2044
Home 804 376-4172 ...... Office email: [log in to unmask]
--

To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions
at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html