The amount of information that the residents of a county can generate in forty years, even with a population numbered in the thousands, not the ten-thousands, is fantastic. Searching through this information for names of individuals is not easy. That is why special seats of honor go to the people who go through the records, extracting names, making sense out of the data, and putting it into a form for others to use. John P. Alcock has done this for Fauquier Co., Virginia, in the forty years after its founding in 1759 to form an almost complete record of Fauquier's eighteenth-century official history.
Let's take one record as an example. Martin Whitescarver (a Germanna name) is listed with the following information (the only Whitescarver to be listed):
97W/Henry Carter - 98W/Thomas C. Dickerson.
The numerals refer to the year so there are records in 1797 and 1798. The letter "W" refers to the tithables list where Joseph Withers was responsible (in the Northwest District) for the records. In this case, Henry Carter paid the tithe in '97 and Thomas C. Dickerson paid the tithe in '98. This pattern is typical of younger individuals who often lived with another family. Whether Martin Whitescarver remained in Fauquier Co. isn't evident since we have approached the end of the book in time. (The name Whitescarver is usually given as Weissgerber in German; in America, it often appears in the form Wisecarver.)
The first part of the book is in alphabetical form under the family name of the individual to whom the information was judged to be most relevant. When the abstract contains references to individuals with surnames different from the principal actor, those names are cross referenced in the second section of the book.
One of the bug-a-boos of eighteenth-century records is the wide variation in spelling. Numerous variations of almost all family names were written into the records by the clerks and the owners of the names. Different individuals had their own rules for phonetic spellings. It is impossible to distinguish between eighteenth-century Robinsons and Robertsons, Glascocks and Glasscocks, Austins and Ostins, or Cannadays and Kennedys. Mr. Alcock, to make efficient use of the pages, uses a standardized spelling for each family name which is usually a common modern spelling. For example, Holtzclaw is how the name is spelled for one Germanna family name even though there are equally good variants such as Holsclaw. The forms Carnes, Kearns, Keirnes, Kerns, and Kirns, with or without the "s" are all placed under Kearns. But the author warns that the user should check for himself.
The book is meant to be a guide to finding the original records of interest. Information contained in the abstracts is lean, but some genealogical relationships are included. On one occasion, after the book was published, I asked Mr. Alcock about the sons of Harmon Rector. By consulting his own book, he was able to answer that one son was John, an attribution that had not been made before. More generally, the original records will have to be and will want to be consulted.
Unfortunately, not all records were able to be used. Since the book appeared, the staff at the court house has found and indexed some loose papers. Within these loose papers, Mr. Alcock was able to answer another Rector question. But still, life is a lot easier for having books such as " Fauquier Families ".
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.