For many of the seminars I spoke about or exhibited my own work, I was the house guest of local genealogists. And most of the time, the spare bed was in the same room where those persons housed their own genealogy collections: libraries of books, looseleaf binders with their notes and pedigrees, copies of their computer printouts, photocopies of documents, and genealogies compiled by others.
What happens to these collections when the genealogist dies or is no longer able to pursue their genealogy?
Henrico County Virginia Land Patent Abstracts with Some Plat Maps, Volume 1: Land Patents and Grants Abstracted by Bert Mayes, dec’d and Selena Du Lac. Maps drawn by Selena Du Lac. 2004. Available from Selena Du Lac, 3020 Winterhaven Dr., Lake Havasu City AZ 86404. “Winner of the Don Mosher Memorial Award.”
This book caught my eye on the bookshelf at the Family History Library as I whizzed by to some other county. I pulled it from the shelf and looked at the Introduction:
Most of the patents contained in this book were transcribed by Bertram (Bert) Leonidas Mayes who was born in 1927 and died in 1998. Bert was a second generation genealogist and following in his father’s footsteps, did much Virginia research. He left behind a legacy when he left his documented research which not only covered his Mayes and allied families by the neighbors of his ancestors. I never had the opportunity to meet my distant cousin Bert, but we corresponded several times about genealogy, and I appreciate all of his many years of research.
During the summer of 2001, I had the priviledge of helping to catalogue Bert’s research and I felt that much of it needed to be published and shared with other researchers and it is thru the Don Mosher Virginia Award that this first publication is possible. I want to thank Merrill Mosher and the committee who chose this work, for this award, and for the confidence, which they entrusted in me…
Henrico County was the scene of the second settlement in the colony of Virginia and was established in 1634 as one of its eight original shires. Its boundaries incorporated an area from which ten Virginia counties were later formed in whole or in part, as well as the cities of Richmond, Charlotesville, and Colonial Heights…
The maps contained in this volume were made using a mapping program and then I added the waterways, so these are my interpretations, as I saw them, and not guaranteed to be 100% accurate…
Ms Du Lac has given us a wonderful service by making these abstracts available and mapping as many of them as she did. In the mapping process, errors appeared and she corrected them. Additional names discovered, she also added.
Then I read the Preface:
Bert Mayes died suddenly and unexpectedly in early 1998, leaving behind a genealogical and historical archive containing more than 10,000 pages of materials–mostly patent and deed abstracts and maps from forty-plus Virginia counties and more than a dozen states…
Negotiations are underway to arrange for organizing and indexing the entire Bert Mayes archive to make it available to the public in an appropriate facility. It is also hoped that many more of his abstracts and maps can be published, increasing their availability…
But is is to MS DuLac to whom all credit is due for getting this excellent volume published. Joseph Barron Chandler, Jr., Washington DC, 27 May 2004.
This volume includes all the Henrico patents through 1719. With a complete, every-name index. And we can add it to our arsenal of Virginia resources, with the expectation that these updates, corrections, additions, etc. to the already valuable and much-used shelves of Virginia property records will lead us to pedigree proofs and extensions. Many thanks, from your favorite Virginia genealogist, Arlene Eakle http:www.arleneeakle.com
PS I invite all my readers to look around you for other unfinished genealogy work that needs assistance. Look around, identify the work, consider what you can do to help complete it and make it available to the rest of us. Since we never run out of genealogy, we never run out of the need for resources and indexes and maps…
PPS And many thanks to Merrill Mosher.
These 3 books are wonderful. I found my Fergus(s)on’s exact land location (which is now part of Pocahantas Park) using these books. The large 1888 map in the Gene. Soc. near by the Park was not helpfull. Thank you Mrs. Du Lac for your doing such a good job.
AAnderson