Miss Elizabeth surely is correct.

As an example, while most of us have used Ms. Nugent's "Cavaliers and Pioneers", each of us knows that those abstracts are NOT what any of us would describe as "originals" (I almost never use that word).  Nevertheless we all benefited from those and from her enormous effort.  Fortunately now, and thanks to VA Library and such as Brent and his people, we are able to move one step closer to those early documents from which Ms. Nugent worked.

Thus it is that it may be said that the internet copies likely are as near as we may come to the "originals" without travel and extraordinary effort.

Paul


Genealogy without documentation is nothing.
                     Paul Drake JD
                Genealogist & Author
            <www.DrakesBooks.com>


  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Mills
  To: [log in to unmask]
  Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2006 7:04 PM
  Subject: Re: [VA-ROOTS] Documents & Sources


  Eve wrote:
  >In working with land
  descriptions to locate topographic features with changing names, I have
  pondered the question of what is an original source. Images of the
  hand-written pages of the land patent and grant books are available at the
  Library of Virginia web site. They are helpful in locating old land
  boundaries, but they are not the original sources of these boundary
  descriptions. The descriptions were copied into the books by a clerk from
  the hand-written land patents. The descriptions in the land patents came
  from the surveyors who surveyed the land.



  It seems to me that the word "original" is much like the word "truth." We
  use it to signify an ideal, but we can never be sure of what the "original"
  or the "truth" actually is. As a practical matter, the most that "original"
  can mean is "the *most original* form of the record that is known to exist.

  On the other hand, the work of those who strive to FIND that "original" and
  that "truth" tends to be far more reliable than that of genealogists who are
  willing to trust whatever they see.

  Elizabeth

  -----------------------------------------------------
  Elizabeth Shown Mills, CG, CGL, FASG

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