Page:A Guide to the Preparation of County Road Histories.pdf/17

 Although this publication appears to be comprehensive, and is a good starting point, certain maps do exist which are not listed therein. Maps, much like gold, are where one finds them.

All of the foregoing information from the survey of sources should fit rather easily onto the two sides of a legal sized sheet of paper without undue crowding or the necessity for miniaturisation. If it is desired to provide similar comprehensive listings for the adjacent counties, a separate sheet may be resorted to for each of those.

There are a number of additional sources which, while probably not worthy of inclusion within-the provenance chart, should be included in this survey. Newspapers, particularly those of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often can serve to confirm or to elucidate what is either known or suspected concerning roads and bridges. Not so useful in the eighteenth because of the smaller number of papers then publishing, they may in specific instances still be used to some advantage. Surviving papers and their locations are listed in Lester Coppon's (New York, 1936).

Considering the fact that many or most of the road orders define the areas of road under consideration by reference to individuals, their plantations and mills, local genealogists will become a necessary adjunct to the road research, a relationship which it is hoped will prove mutually beneficial. This hope will be at least partially realised if, as in the Albemarle project, the accumulated road orders are indexed and published. Of course, the best arrangement of all would be for those doing the research itself to be people already possessed of a strong inclination toward local history and genealogy and, most importantly, some experience working in these fields.

Such well-known statewide resources as E.G. Swem's, the , the and others may prove useful, along with the manuscript and microfilm collections at such major repositories as the Virginia State Library, where most extant county court records up to 1865 are available on film. Also useful is the listing of county histories in (Virginia State Library, 1971, 1976 supplement), although the spate of new county histories recently issuing from the various local groups tends to make this somewhat out of date.

To sum up this section on the survey of the sources for a history of the roads of a county, the author would like to emphasise the importance of those official records dealing directly with roads themselves or, as in the case of plats and maps, illustrating their locations. These will be the primary source materials of the study, while those others which serve to shed some light on one or another of the many facets of roads and their development can be only secondary or supporting evidence. The question of what constitutes valid evidence will be dealt with and some rules drawn from the author's experience set forth in a later section. Before this, it is perhaps in order to look at some of the techniques used during the Albemarle study for the recording of evidence of various forms and for its correlation with maps, present roads and other forms of evidence such as surviving road traces. – 11 –