Recording the Evidence
The road and bridge orders contained in the order books of the counties from which Albemarle ultimately came to be formed were a primary source of information for that study. Those from 1728-1816 were extracted and ultimately indexed and printed by the Virginia Highway and Transportation Research Council. All of the county court order books used were in manuscript, often damaged and faded so as to be almost indecipherable. Some of the earlier eighteenth century materials were in the rather ornate, engrossing script and copperplate of the time (see Figure 4), with the phonetic spellings of this period often serving to further complicate matters for the researcher.
In order to facilitate the gathering of this material and its exact reproduction, a system was devised to render these road orders literatim into a hand-held dictaphone tape recorder. This system might be set out in the following rather general rules:
- Capitalisation to be so stated. Viz: "cap Wadlow cap Cuthbert cap Twaddle" in the case of the name Wadlow Cuthbert Twaddle and any other words in the road order which are capitalised.
- Names with variant or phonetic spellings to be spelled out.
- No periods unless so stated.
- Periods, commas, colons, semicolons, etc., to be stated.
- Date and pagination in order book, vestry book, etc., to be
stated. Pre-1752 dates to be designated O.S. for Old Style.
- Each new citation to be so stated.
- No paragraphing unless so stated.
- Tape reels to be marked sequentially as completed with county, name of record, book number(s), and approximate date covered.
Following this, the orders were put into typescript by a series of patient, long-suffering secretaries who had to unlearn all the modern rules of spelling and then learn to render the orders exactly as dictated into the tape recorder. Following this transcription, the tapes were compared to the transcripts by the original recorder and errors were corrected. After being placed in their final form and indexed, the road orders were ready for publication. In published form the road orders were then distributed to a wide variety of organisations and individuals engaged in historical and genealogical research, as well as sociologists, folklorists, and people in a variety of other disciplines.
With these road orders available in printed form, it was possible for an individual using a copying machine, scissors, and paste pot (or stapler), to
produce chronological chains of road orders illustrating the development of each of the early roads from the threshold of settlement up through the eighteenth
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