LC National Digital Library Program announces release of Early Virginia Religious Petitions

[Tamara Swora-Gober <tswo@xxxxxxx>]

This message is being widely posted

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The National Digital Library Program at the Library of Congress
announces the release of the collection ?Early Virginia Religious
Petitions? at the American Memory website with the URL below: 

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/repehtml/

This online collection makes available 423 petitions submitted to the
Virginia legislature between 1774 and 1802 from more than eighty
counties and cities in Virginia.  It is a collaborative online venture
of the Library of Congress and the Library of Virginia in Richmond,
Virginia, (http://lva.va.us/).  Founded in 1823, the Library of Virginia
holds Virginia's official records from 1607 through the present.  Its
archival holdings exceed 86.7 million items including court records, tax
lists, executive and legislative manuscripts, personal papers and maps. 
The Library, located in historic downtown Richmond, houses more than
726,000 printed volumes and serials, 1,091 current periodicals and
newspapers plus more than 238,000 photographs, broadsides, pictures and paintings.

?Early Virginia Religious Petitions? reveals the breadth and fervor of
public opinion on a wide range of religious issues in the young
Commonwealth of Virginia, including the rights of dissenters such as
Baptists and Presbyterians, and those of pacifist Quakers who sought
military exemption.  Other topics covered include the historic debate
over the separation of church and state championed by James Madison and
Thomas Jefferson, the sale and division of property within the
established church, and the dissolution of unpopular vestries.  In
addition to images of these petitions, the collection also provides
searchable access to the petitions' places of origin and a brief summary
of each petition's contents, as well as summaries of an additional
seventy-four petitions whose full text has been lost.

The collection complements the Library of Congress exhibition ?Religion
and the Founding of the American Republic? which can be found at:

http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/

Digitizing the Collection

These Early Virginia Religious Petitions were arranged chronologically
and microfilmed at the Library of Virginia in 1966 on three reels of
35mm microfilm.  Most of the petitions were bound in volumes at the time
of microfilming and in most cases, a single microfilm frame contains two
document pages as they would be seen in a bound volume opened flat. 
However, the frames were scanned so that each digital image contains
only a single document page.  Because the bound volumes comprise sundry
leaves of varying size and shape, the microfilm frames often contain
irregular objects such as the verso of a small document leaf on the left
and the recto of a large document leaf on the right.  The preparation of
the documents for microfilming required placing either black or white
masking around the edges of smaller leaves, to prevent other pages in
the volume from showing through.  Custom cropping of the digital images
removed this masking while preserving the page edge.

Access Design

Access to this collection is through search and browse pages that link
to a database created by NDL staff from the ?Calendar of Religious
Petitions Submitted to the Colonial and State Legislatures, 1774-1802?,
an unpublished guide to the collection produced by the Library of
Virginia.  The Calendar is a chronological listing of 497 religious
petitions known to have been submitted to the Virginia legislatures. 
Only 423 of these are included in the microfilm and have been scanned
for the online collection as digital images; the rest do not survive. 
Every record in the database contains the date of the petition; the
place of origin, if known, or the designation "Miscellaneous" if the
place of origin is not known; and a brief summary of the petition's
content.  For those petitions which no longer survive, a summary of the
contents has been quoted from the Journal of the House of Delegates. 
The database may be searched by place of origin and content summary, or
browsed by date and place of origin.  A number of petitions were signed
and submitted by more than one locality, and these are cross-listed
under each county or city. 

Please forward questions about this and all other American Memory
collections to ndlpcoll@xxxxxxx