The Virginia Colonial Records Project was established in the 1950s by the
Virginia Historical Society, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the University
of Virginia Library, and the Library of Virginia to reconsitute the archive of Virginia's
colonial history--a documentary record decimated by war and fire during the Old Dominion's
first three centuries.*
Between 1955 and 1985, project agents visited more
than one hundred libraries and archives in Great Britain, Ireland, and France to
survey their collections for Virginia related documents. Agents reported their findings
about pertinent records on Survey Reports from which the project ordered microfilm
of many original documents. The project has generated 14,704 of these Survey Reports
(which vary in length from one to more than one hundred pages) and acquired 963 reels
of microfilmed documents.*
* from The Virginia Colonial Records Project
Home Page "About the Project" which can be accessed at: http://leo.vsla.edu/colonial/vcrpabout.html
Keyword
and Boolean searches to access digitized images of the Survey Reports are available
through the Library of Virginia's website at http://eagle.vsla.edu/colonial/.
Approximately 2/3 of the documents identified in the survey reports have been microfilmed. These microfilmed copies of the original documents may be viewed at the Library
of Virgina.
Click here to contact us about obtaining copies from the Colonial Records Project.
