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