Hanover County, Virginia was erected from New Kent in 1720, which itself had been formed from York County in 1654. (In 1742 Hanover lost that portion now embraced by Louisa County.) Most of the records of the Hanover County Court were destroyed at the end of the Civil War, which is why those that did survive, the subject of this book, are of the utmost importance. Confining itself to Chancery Wills and Notes, this work consists of copies or abstracts of bills and petitions, wills and deeds, powers of attorney, administrators' accounts, depositions, receipts, and letters, bearing reference, in total, to some 7,000 persons. In the treatment and presentation of the Notes the object was to extract every detail of genealogical, biographical, and historical significance, and to arrange such matter alphabetically and chronologically in relation to families. In the treatment of the wills the aim was to provide either a comprehensive abridgement or an authentic verbatim copy. Possessing a complete name index, this is the starting point for genealogical research in Hanover County.

In this very scarce two-volume work, Mr. and Mrs. Glazebrook succeeded in extracting those documents pertaining to Hanover County that survived the burning of Richmond in April 1865 and that were not published in William Ronald Cocke's "Hanover County Chancery Wills and Notes." The surviving materials consist of a great many deeds, wills, inventories, accounts, letters, depositions, etc., pertaining to Hanover County for the colonial and early Federal periods.

From the end of the Revolution until 1851, the Virginia legislature granted most divorces in the state. It granted divorces rarely, however, turning down two-thirds of those who petitioned for them. Men and women who sought release from unhappy marriages faced a harsh legal system buttressed by the political, religious, and communal cultures of southern life. Through the lens of this hostile environment, Thomas Buckley explores with sympathy the lives and legal struggles of those who challenged it. Based on research in almost 500 divorce files, The Great Catastrophe of My Life involves a wide cross-section of Virginians. Their stories expose southern attitudes and practices involving a spectrum of issues from marriage and family life to gender relations, interracial sex, adultery, desertion, and domestic violence. Although the oppressive legal regime these husbands and wives battled has passed away, the emotions behind their efforts to dissolve the bonds of marriage still resonate strongly.

This book is the first to explore the history of a powerful category of illicit sex in America's past: liaisons between Southern white women and black men. Martha Hodes tells a series of stories about such liaisons in the years before the Civil War, explores the complex ways in which white Southerners tolerated them in the slave South, and shows how and why these responses changed with emancipation. Hodes provides details of the wedding of a white servant-woman and a slave man in 1681, an antebellum rape accusation that uncovered a relationship between an unmarried white woman and a slave, and a divorce plea from a white farmer based on an adulterous affair between his wife and a neighborhood slave. Drawing on sources that include courtroom testimony, legislative petitions, pardon pleas, and congressional testimony, she presents the voices of the authorities, eyewitnesses, and the transgressors themselves--and these voices seem to say that in the slave South, whites were not overwhelmingly concerned about such liaisons, beyond the racial and legal status of the children that were produced. Only with the advent of black freedom did the issue move beyond neighborhood dramas and into the arena of politics, becoming a much more serious taboo than it had ever been before. Hodes gives vivid examples of the violence that followed the upheaval of war, when black men and white women were targeted by the Ku Klux Klan and unprecedented white rage and terrorism against such liaisons began to erupt. An era of terror and lynchings was inaugurated, and the legacy of these sexual politics lingered well into the twentieth century.

From Tyler's quarterly historical and genealogical magazine.