An Example Search
A search in the Augusta Archive is more like a scavenger hunt than finding an entry in an encyclopedia or playing a video game. Although the computing equipment is sophisticated, the records around which the Archive is built were very much the product of the mid-nineteenth century. The government was becoming more systematic in counting and taxing people, but omissions and mistakes were common. Photography still was not widespread. Diaries and letters, more often than not, remained in people's attics rather than being sent to libraries. Newspapers, with no wire services and no reporting staffs, had to get information wherever they could find it. Even more limiting was the nearly total domination of the public record by white men.
So a search in the Archive is a challenge. You are looking for pieces of information which you can assemble into a reasonable likeness of a person, hints that let you imagine what it must have been like to have lived in Augusta almost a century and a half ago.
You must use intuition and your accumulating knowledge as well as the computer's searching capabilities to find people or topics in which you are interested. Think when it might be, for example, that a woman would be mentioned in the newspaper (usually on her wedding and her death, unfortunately). Think how you might get at the history of African-Americans in the Valley (not only in the registry of free blacks, for example, but also in ads in the newspaper or under "mulatto" in the population census). Think how you might go about finding a child, as Thomas Woodrow Wilson was in these years, by tracing his or her family.
To demonstrate what you might find about a prominent adult white male, the sort of person most likely to appear in the records of the Augusta Archive, we have constructed an example search.
William Smith Hanger Baylor was a notable young citizen of Staunton in the 1850s. He appears in the 1860 census, where we see that he was a twenty- seven year-old attorney, married, and held substantial property. He appears in the newspaper at the time of his marriage, when he sponsored a college, when he was elected captain of the West Augusta Guards, and as a participant in local politics. He appears in the detailed military rosters compiled by Robert Driver and Lee Wallace. We have two pictures of him, one as Commonwealth Attorney and one as captain of the Guards.
Each of these records came from a different source and each offers only a glimpse of Baylor. But by combining these glimpses, we can gain a fairly full picture of this young man of antebellum Staunton.
To begin a search of your own, please click on one of the icons.
Click on the red
ball to return to the main Archive, from which you can continue
your search, begin a new search, or exit the Archive.