The Virginia Colonial Records Project contsist of about a thousand reels
of microfilm made during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s to provide research
copies of pre-1800 Virginia-related materials in European (mostly
British) repositories. Each collection or record group was described in
a Survey Report before the documents were filmed. Some reports are
extremely detailed, some are quite general. Some record groups consist
of one or two sheets of paper, some of a series of large volumes each
with several hundred pages. The amount of detail in the Survey Reports
varies widely.

Because of the manner in which the surveying and filiming was done,
sequences of records from particular libraries or archival agencies are
broken up and are therefore not necessarily on consecutive reels of
film.

There is an on-line searchable database that allows researches to browse
the Survey Reports, and from that data base you can ascertain which reel
of the VCRP microfilm contains the original documents. The data base
allows searches by repository and also by the personal names and by ship
names that appear in the Survey Reports.

If you have a citation to a record group from a British repository, you
can also search the data base that way and identify which reel(s) of
microfilm to review. Bibliographical finding aids such as those that
John Raimo and the late Charles McLean Andrews compiled are very helpful
in identifying the record groups to search.

To get to the on-line database, begin at the Library of Virginia's Web
site at http://www.lva.virginia.gov and click open the site index in the
left margin, then click open the letter V and then click open Virginia
Colonial Records Project. This is a several-step process, and
unfortunately you pretty much have to know what you want in order to be
able to find it.

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
[log in to unmask]

Please note the new e-mail address.

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