Madison County, Virginia Genealogy

United States &gt; Virginia &gt; Madison County



Parent County
1792--Madison County was created 4 December 1792 from Culpeper County. County seat: Madison

Neighboring Counties

 * Culpeper
 * Greene
 * Orange
 * Page
 * Rappahannock

Cemeteries
LDS Cemetery Records

Vol. 1


 * page 146 - Fairview Cemetery, at Hood
 * page 149 - Rose Park Cemetery, at Wolfton

Court
Chancery Court


 * Indexes and images to Madison County, Virginia Chancery Records 1802-1881 are available online through Virginia Memory: Chancery Records Index. Additional records are available at the Madison County Courthouse. These records, which were often concerned with inheritance disputes, contain a wealth of genealogical information.

Family Histories

 * [Clore] Yowell, Claude Lindsay, B.C. Holtzclaw, Charles Herbert Huffman, and Memorial Foundation of the Germanna Colonies in Virginia. Clore, Yager, and Utz Descendants - 1717 Colonists. Harrisonburg, Virginia: Memorial Foundation of the Germanna Colonies in Virginia, 1967. Available at FHL.
 * [Utz] See Clore.
 * [Yager] See also Clore.
 * [Yager] Moran, Ruth Eager. "John H. Yager, Madison Co., Va., Revolutionary Soldier," The Virginia Genealogist, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Jan.-Mar. 1980):18. Available at FHL; digital version at New England Ancestors ($).

Immigration

 * Coldham, Peter Wilson. North American Wills Registered in London 1611-1857. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., 2007. [Includes will a of resident of Madison County proved in London. These records often help establish an immigrant's place of origin.]

Land
Grants and Patents


 * Blankenbaker. 204 patents dated 1722-1739 in what is now Madison County, Virginia (Placed on a Map). DeedMapper, 2004. [In order to view this map, it is necessary to purchase Direct Line Software's DeedMapper product.]

Newspapers
Professor Tom Costa and The Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia have created a database of all runaway advertisements for slaves, indentured servants, transported convicts, and ship deserters listed in the Virginia Gazette and other Virginia newspapers (1736-1803), see: The Geography of Slavery in Virginia.

Probate
London Courts


 * Coldham, Peter Wilson. North American Wills Registered in London 1611-1857. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., 2007. [Includes will a of resident of Madison County proved in London. These records often help establish an immigrant's place of origin.]

Research Guides

 * "A Guide to the Counties of Virginia: Madison County," The Virginia Genealogist, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Jan.-Mar. 1973):50-52. Available at FHL; digital version at New England Ancestors ($).

Taxation
At first glance, researchers might conclude that Virginia tax lists contain very little family history data, though one soon learns that valuable genealogical conclusions can be drawn from these records, nicknamed "annual censuses," such as: relationships, approximate years of birth, socio-economic status, identification of neighbors, the ability to distinguish between persons of the same name, evidence of land inheritance, years of migration, and years of death.

Virginia began enumerating residents' payments of personal property and land taxes in 1782. These two types of taxation were recorded in separate registers. Personal property tax lists include more names than land tax lists, because they caught more of the population. The Family History Library has an excellent microfilm collection of personal property tax lists from 1782 (or the year the county was organized) well into the late nineteenth century for most counties, but only scattered land tax lists. Microfilm collections at The Library of Virginia include land tax lists for all counties and independent cities for the years 1782 through 1978, as well as personal property tax lists for the years 1782 through 1930 (and every fifth year thereafter). Taxes were not collected in 1808.

Some tax records are available online or in print, though published abstracts often omit useful details found only in the original sources. Statewide indexes can help genealogists identify specific counties where surnames occurred in the past, providing starting points for research.


 * Images of the 1799 Personal Property Tax Lists of Madison County, Virginia are available online, courtesy: Binns Genealogy.
 * Ward, Roger D. 1815 Directory of Virginia Landowners (and Gazetteer). 6 vols. Athens, Georgia: Iberian Pub. Co., 1997-2000. Available at FHL. [The source for this publication is 1815 land tax. Madison County is included in Vol. 4.]

Websites

 * USGenWeb project. May have maps, name indexes, history or other information for this county. Select the state, then the county.
 * Family History Library Catalog

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