Southampton County, VA Records

The Brantley Collection of Southampton County Court Record Books

All of the early record books at the Southampton County court house were imaged and indexed and are available at the Brantley Association website. The deed, will, order and minute books, as well as marriage, guardianship and miscellaneous books through the late 1880s are included in the collection. The records are remarkably complete for a Virginia county established in 1749–except for the earliest marriages. Note that the books here are not all of the early records for the county. A large volume of “loose papers” exists, most of which are available through the Library of Virginia [LVA county records collection] or at Family Search. 

This collection of record books was imaged and indexed by the Brantley Family Association in 2009-2010. In 2023 VGS accepted the collection from the Association to ensure its free, permanent internet access, with the approval of the Southampton County Court Clerk. 

To use the collection, first determine your dates of interest. Then select the record books covering those dates from one of the sections below. Then click on the index for that volume. The following symbols are used in the indexes:

Africans + (slave or free)
Indians ^ (native Americans)
A site * (most but not all volumes have an integrated location index)
? Name not clear or indistinct

Make sure you check the indexes for all variant spellings of the surname you are searching. In early days most people could not read or write, so the clerk would often use phonetic spellings for names he was not familiar with. The indexes use the clerk’s spelling in all cases, but sometimes added more conventional spellings when found later. Remember to check for more than one instance of a name on a page. It was not practical to aggregate all the names or use Soundex when VGS took over the collection.

When you have identified names of interest by page number, go to that volume’s images, which are listed by document page number corresponding to the index. Almost all of this material has since been imaged and put online by Family Search. If the image quality is poor in the Brantley collection, try the Family Search images (after logging in here, go to Search, Catalog, enter Southampton, Virginia, US) to find the same book. Note that the FS images are not document paginated but image paginated with several introductory images (or even more than one book on a reel), but it’s not difficult to find the document pages. Sometimes the document page numbers themselves are not visible from corner tears, smudges, etc. In that case, look back or forward a page or two.

To submit corrections to the indexes, contact webmaster@vgs.org.

Records are incomplete. View an overview of Southampton County Record Gaps.