Parade of States -- online digital genealogy resources -- Virginia

Time to get back to the Parade of States, this post is on Virginia's online resources. It is interesting to see the variety of resources that some states have already put online and the paucity of resources from other states. The differences in availability do not seem to be governed by economics or the size of the population, but generally, larger states have more resources, with some notable exceptions.

Virginia has some collections of online records, and what is available is valuable for research. But some of the catalogs are difficult to use and there is a lack of any online vital records or other similar source material. Here is a selection of records:

• Colonial Williamsburg The Library develops indexes, databases, and finding aids; scans full text primary source documents, subscribes to commercial databases and selects free Internet resources relevant to the academic and professional studies of eighteenth-century British America and the Early American Republic. These sources encompass text and images pertaining to the social life, architecture, language, politics, trades, decorative and performing arts, and literature of the times.

• The Library of Virginia, Multi-Catalog Search This is the main access point for state government records, military records, personal papers, family Bible records, genealogical notes and charts, church and cemetery records, business records, maps, and other archival and manuscript material. Some finding aids are available online. Document images for 6,000 family Bible records are available online.

• Oral Histories in the Perry Library (Old Dominion University)Approximately 100 or more oral histories. You can access both the audio file and a transcription online.

• The Valley of the Shadow I have written about this collection before. It is a very interesting site.
  

• Virginia Center for Digital History I wrote about this previously. See the link above for The Valley of the Shadow.

• Virginia Genealogy A lot of general reference material but not a lot of original sources.
  

• Virginia Memory Virginia Memory is part of the online presence of the Library of Virginia, the state archives and reference library at the seat of government for the Commonwealth of Virginia. Established in 1823, the Library maintains vast and varied collections of print materials, manuscripts, archival records, newspapers, photographs and ephemera, maps and atlases, rare books, and fine art that tell the history of the commonwealth and its people. Since the mid-1990s, the Library has digitized parts of the collections in an effort to make the materials more widely available to online users. Here is the list of the online digital collections.

• Virtual Jamestown Part of the Virginia Center for Digital History. (See above).

If you know of any other resources, please feel free to comment.