Madison County Virginia Records

New Papyrus Publishing Company's On-Line Catalog:
Madison County Virginia

Madison County was created in 1793 from the southwestern portion of Culpeper County. It honored James Madison, "Father of the American Constitution" and later President of the United States. Its boundaries have remained stable since that time. The earliest land patents in the area date from 1732, and German settlers began to migrate into the area bounded by Madison during the early 1720s. Hebron Church, situated on the Robinson River, was one of the earliest and most successful of the German Lutheran congregations in America. Here could be found numerous families who migrated away from Governor Spotswood's Germanna Colony in search of new lands. From here, families drifted into the Blue Ridge and beyond into the Shenandoah Valley to join the Pennsylvanian Germans already settled there.

For a better understanding of county boundary changes, see our new section Virginia in Maps

Madison County,Virginia 1810 Federal Census: A Transcription
John Vogt, 2007, iv, 27 pp., arranged by alpha letter5½" x8½ " format. Census returns are some of the first records that a genealogist turns to when studying a new family line. Unfortunately for Madison County, as well as Virginia as a whole, both the 1790 and 1800 census reports for that state are lost. While the reason for their loss is argued, they nevertheless no longer exist. While personal property tax and land tax lists (which date from 1782) can be used to give some information about individuals, they do not give the researcher a glimpse into family composition or a snapshot of the county as a whole. Hence Madison’s 1810 census is the first real window we have from the census records of this county which had been settled a century before and whose western boundary was the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
With the advent of the computer age and the publication of most of these early censuses, one would expect that many of the genealogist’s problems would be resolved. Unfortunately, this has not happened. While many researchers rely completely upon online census records, these are often flawed by misread names and missing names altogether. The problem is the difficult reading of the documents, which often are written in a tight, cramped hand and with a myriad of possible readings. The close similarity between “S’ and “L,” “F” and “T”, and recognizing the secretarial s, which appears as “ss” in the middle of words but not as an ending, can lead to nightmares in translation. Oftentimes, there is no distinction between an “e”, an “o”, and an “a” unless the reader is familiar with the family names within the document. These are only a few visual issues facing the transcriber. The author has been fortunate to have a professional background in paleography and history, both medieval and modern. In transcribing the current volume, comparison was made with other documents, as well as carefully examining each questionable character under magnification to ascertain the true intent of the writer. In the process, it became apparent that sometimes the census recorder himself was not familiar with strange-sounding German names or heavy Scottish brogues. One spelling would appear in the first encounter with the family, and then later on in the document a different spelling would be given for the same family surname. In brief, computerized lists, while useful, do not give a total and accurate picture of the data. The census was recorded in booklet form, consisting of twenty sheets of paper that were folded in the middle and written on in landscape fashion. So when the first half of the first page was filled with information and turned over, the back of that sheet became page two. In addition, the census enumerator conserved paper by writing in a very tiny hand, and herein lies the problem with “a”, “e” and “o” in the body of a name. Only by carefully examining the transitions between characters can an accurate reading be obtained.
[Md10] $5.95

MADISON COUNTY MARRIAGES, 1792-1850 John Vogt & T. William Kethley, Jr. 1984, vii, 156 pages, indices, figure, map. The 1,976 marriage records in this volume are transcribed and abstracted in their entirety from various county records and include the names of parents, ministers, and occasionally names of bondsmen and witnesses.
[Madi] $18.00

Madison Co. 1815 Directory of Landowners by Roger G. Ward. 2005. 18 pages, map, 5 1/2X8 1/2.
For a full description of the 1815 LAND DIRECTORY Records and a listing of available counties, see: Individual County Booklets, 1815 Directory of Virginia Landowners
[Vd62] $6.00

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For more records pertaining to MADISON COUNTY, VIRGINIA see also:

Culpeper County
Guide to Virginia Militia Units in the War of 1812

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New Papyrus Publishing Company's On-Line Catalog: Madison County Virginia

New Papyrus Publishing Company's On-Line Catalog:
Madison County Virginia