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8 page PDF research guide includes:
Guide for Two Miles from Nowhere: How Russell County Became the Road West
Somewhere on Copper Creek in 1787, a tax collector wrote “Stills, Isaiah, one horse, five cattle” and rode on to the next farm, never knowing he had just carried three years of a fugitive’s borrowed name into the permanent record. Russell County broke off from Washington County that same decade, but it did not sit still afterward. Six more counties split from its territory before 1880, so a family whose fence line never moved could still end up with a deed in one courthouse and a grandchild’s estate settlement in another. This companion moves through the record types that carry a Russell County migration story: the annual tax lists that stand in for three missing censuses, the deed and court order books that never stopped running through every split, the chancery causes where a family’s own sworn testimony survives, and the church letters of dismission that can name the exact place a household went next.
What's Inside
- Six-record-type reference table covering personal property tax lists, land grants and deed books, county court order books, chancery causes, early Baptist church letters of dismission, and the 1787 tax list and militia rosters that stand in for the missing 1790, 1800, and 1810 censuses
- Signal interpretation table for catching aliases, spelling variants, and scribal substitutions across tax lists, deeds, and court order books
- County-split tracking table for the six counties carved from Russell between 1792 and 1880, with the courthouse each now calls home and how to confirm jurisdiction by date
- Repository and access guide scoped to Russell County and its six successor counties, including Virginia Untold for enslaved and free Black ancestors
- Research worksheet with an ancestor identification block, a six-record-type entry log, and cross-reference analysis prompts
- Notes pages