Rockbridge Genealogy Resources

Featured here: a freely accessible, keyword-searchable ‘Encyclopedia’ produced by the Rockbridge Area Genealogical Society, “Rockbridge County Heritage Book: 1778-1997.” At bottom, a series of links to more targeted transcriptions and annotations of census records, cemeteries, and selected inventories of wartime record. For direct access to a variety local primary source records, the best resources and personally staffed support are accessible at:

Special Collections (540.458.8663) also archives RHS’ own range of historic papers, photographs. Their expertise in both social and family history is crucial to our mission and audiences. A valuable, personally responsive resource to public inquiries.

Rockbridge Area Genealogy Society partnered with RHS in 2020 to digitize a remarkable resource it had produced in 1997. Their Heritage Book gathers a wealth of richly researched, narrative family profiles, and snapshots of local institutions: invitingly illustrated and written in engaging narrative form, relative to other biographical inventories and databases. With RAGS’ dissolution as a volunteer organization, RHS now gratefully, purposefully shares this unique legacy for descendants, residents, and researchers.

The 500 page volume is free to the public; accessible online or to download; digitally searchable by name, date, or keyword.  Sections are subdivided for manageable file-size, with the fully scanned book hot-linked at top, for more systematic searching. Each section is fronted with the Table of Contents (index chaptered separately) to cue you to institutions and events often missing in genealogical records. Those cultural overviews are full of ‘local color’ and contexts, to complement the wide webs of interrelated family profiles.

Click the book above for the entire book, or the images below for each volume

Other Local History & Genealogy Resources

Census Transcripts & Annotations

Comprehensive local census transcriptions bracketing the Civil War. The thousands of keyword searchable entries also include available information regarding birth & death dates; birth state or country; age; gender; race; free & enslaved status; members of household; occupation; as well as many secondary source cues in the endnotes.

African-American Databases

RHS is helping develop a growing archive of searchable databases chronicling free and enslaved black lives in 18th and 19th Century Rockbridge. Return to learn more.

War Service Records

More selective, by conflict and location, these afford both individual and comparative information on the experience of local servicemen and women; regiments and service branches; some family, occupational, educational, religious and institutional links.

Local Cemeteries

W&L Special Collections and the Rockbridge Regional Library hold a number of church histories that provide more systematic records of their own cemeteries’ histories, or particular burials of noted congregational members.

Owned by Lexington Presbyterian Church: 1790s-1949,

Owned by City of Lexington: SJMC 1949-2020, Oak Grove Cemetery 2020-

Online database searchable by name, date, veteran status, site locations