Please visit my other blog, " . . . it yields to no place in Virginia."
The blog posts in " . . . it yields to no place in Virginia" will eventually contain news and advertisements about Colonial Gloucester County (including Kingston Parish, present-day Mathews County) from the pages of the Virginia Gazette, 1736-1780. As of 2012, posting are through 1766 papers.
I researched items included in the index to the Virginia Gazette, produced in 1950 by Lester J. Cappon and Stella F. Duff of the Institute of Early American History and Culture (Omohundro Institute). However, I found many items that they missed, so have gone back to the beginning to look through each paper. (Note: Please review primary source material before citing; use primary source as your citation.)
I've also included other information as additional posts, separate pages and links. Annual lists of world events to put Gloucester events in context. Other textual material provides related primary source information. Links are provided to a number of books and resource papers.
How this blog came about
As a child, I became interested in the history of Gloucester County. My school teachers took us on field trips to these nearby historic places and encouraged my interests. The rural county was an even smaller place then. Its historic features stood out, from the colonial courthouse and tales of Pocahontas to Rosewell on the York and the old homes around the Mobjack Bay. My parents and generations of their ancestors lived in Mathews County, which was a part of Gloucester called Kingston Parish, until 1791, some going back to the area's first European settlers.
History, especially Virginia history, is my first love and history and art history were my college majors. Like many of Gloucester's colonial citizens, I chose to attend the College of William and Mary, just across the river in Williamsburg. But after that, although my career was intended to be in museum work, life took me in different directions. A moderate TBI suffered in 1977 left me with diffuse axonal damage and poor executive function. I suffered from low-level chronic pain and poor reasoning skills. Unfortunately, although I looked pretty normal, I didn't stick with history for one reason and another largely TBI-related. When I fell apart and was finally diagnosed in 2003, history was a great comfort to me. While reading and writing local history books (Arcadia Publications "Images of America" books about Gloucester and Mathews), it called me home. I began to read and write more, research my family history, collect information about Colonial Gloucester, and speak to organizations in Gloucester and Mathews about history and genealogy. My blog, " . . . it yields to no place in Virginia," is a file cabinet of sorts that I stuffed during that time and you're welcome to peruse it. Researchers should remember to check the original source for correctness and cite the original source in bibliographies.
My love of history saw me through nearly a decade of recovery and readjustment until I found something else to do with my life. After my father's stroke and my own realization that I also suffered from a degree of aphasia or something like that, I started to study speech-language pathology. It's been another healing experience, but that's another story. Maybe I'll get back to this blog in a few years. History didn't end up being my career, but it has been and will continue to be my favorite hobby.
