Botetourt County Virginia Heritage

This is the definitive work on Americans taken prisoner during the Revolutionary War. The bulk of the book is devoted to personal accounts, many of them moving, of the conditions endured by U.S. prisoners at the hands of the British, as preserved in journals or diaries kept by physicians, ships' captains, and the prisoners themselves. Of greater genealogical interest is the alphabetical list of 8,000 men who were imprisoned on the British vessel The Old Jersey, which the author copied from the papers of the British War Department and incorporated in the appendix to the work. Also included is a Muster Roll of Captain Abraham Shepherd's Company of Virginia Riflemen and a section on soldiers of the Pennsylvania Flying Camp who perished in prison, 1776-1777.

The author has amassed a bounty of information about Wrights in southern Virginia. This volume contains appendices to Sorting Some of the Wrights of Southern Virginia: Birth Records, 1853 to 1896; Marriage Records, 1769 to 1913; and, Personal Property Tax Lists, 1782 to 1850. These appendices present source records for persons named Wright by county and by type of record with the identification of the person named and their Wright ancestor to the extent known. The identification of a person or their ancestor by year and county indicates their year of death and county of residence at death. If no state is listed after the county, the state is Virginia; counties in states other than Virginia will have a state listed after the county.

In the Virginia of the late eighteenth century, the last outpost before the great wilderness was the town of Fincastle in Botetourt County. Frances Niederer provides a concise and engaging history of Fincastle, from its founding in 1772 to its transformation into a mecca for health seekers who came for its ferromagnesian springs. Host to a diverse architectural heritage, Fincastle boasts a number of great homes and churches that are still intact. This generously illustrated book tells the stories behind these classic structures and how each fits into the larger story of this unique Virginia town.