Detail, Ch'ville Land Book, 1908 (289K)
Charlottesville City Courthouse
Location: 315 East High Street, Charlottesville (archives are in the clerk's office downstairs)
Hours: 8:30-4:30 M-F
Photocopy Prices: $0.50/page
Many of the records housed in the Charlottesville City Courthouse are the same types that can be found in the county courthouse, except they relate to city rather than county locations, and were recorded in the city's Corporation Court rather than the Circuit Court for the county. The city incorporated in 1888, and expanded in 1916, 1939, 1963, and 1968. The legal records related to a given locale will only be in the city courthouse if that locale lay within city boundaries at the time of the action recorded.
The city courthouse holds its own deed books, will books, land books, inventory books (from 1897), chancery order books, fiduciary books, marriage licenses and registers, charter books, and law order books. Examples of a few of these appear below, but generally see the descriptions of these records for the county for details on what kinds of information are available therein.
The city courthouse holds many more loose papers than the county courthouse, which sent much of its documentation to Richmond for archiving. Below, you will find source materials divided into categories based on whether they are in bound volumes or file drawers.
Bound Volumes
Land Books
The city holds no abstracted land books like those found in the county courthouse. Here, land books lay in large long books collected annually. Each book contains lists of landowners divided both by race and by the city ward in which their land lay.
The entry for each piece of land includes the owner's name, the lot number (as opposed to acreage, by which county lands are listed), the name of the street on which the land lies, the lot's value, the value of the buildings on the lot, the state and city
taxes on the lot and buildings, and a record of any changes in ownership of the land that may have occurred in the previous year. Land books are potentially enormously valuable for many purposes--for example, tracking and comparing land ownership by race
across time and for mapping who owned land in what parts of the city.
Delinquent Land
Books
If a person could not afford to pay the taxes on land he or she owned, the land would be sold to the Commonwealth until the owner redeemed it. Alternatively, the land went on sale to the general public. Delinquent land books record, by race,
the names of delinquent land owners, the location of the land on which they owed taxes, the amount of the tax owed, and the date the land was redeemed. Each volume is indexed by the last name of the landowner. Careful use of these records could lead
to suggestions about how often African Americans faced trouble paying their taxes, who lived on the very margins of ownership, and who helped people pay their back taxes (which in turn could be suggestive of the shape of communal and family networks).
Release Deeds
This volume, which runs to 1920, records the deed officially releasing property held either as delinquent land or as security back to its owner. The races of parties involved in these transactions are not recorded in the deed.
Medical Registers
Doctors had to register their license in the locality where they practiced. These volumes hold registrations listing each physician's local address, place and date of birth, the source and date of his license, and his specialty
(optometry, surgery, etc.). Physician's races are not recorded.
Fiduciaries and Notary Bond Books
Dating from 1923, these volumes mostly hold the bonds of security posted by men and women appointed Special Commissioners in chancery causes. In some cases, bonds granting powers of attorney are recorded as well. Each volume is indexed by the name of
the plaintiff in the chancery cause, so if you are looking for information about a particular estate, it helps significantly to know the parties involved in such a lawsuit, or at least the suit number.
Mechanics Lien Books
When contractors worked on a building--as painters or carpenters, for example--they sometimes had difficulty receiving payment for their work. These volumes hold the documents recorded in court by contractors legally
demanding payment and requesting that a lien be placed on the building in question for the amount owed. The races of the contractors and the owners of buildings are not indicated. These deeds yield some information about the nature of the building
trades in the city and who were employed as contractors.
Cross-referencing names with census and city directory materials could provide valuable information about the trades of African Americans and where tradesmen worked.
Judgment Lien
Docket and Execution Books
These volumes essentially record the financial outcome of both civil and criminal cases. Listed are the names of the parties to lawsuits (usually from the corporation court), their lawyers, the date of the judgment, when the case was docketed,
the amount of the judgment (debts and fines owed in civil cases, court costs in criminal causes), the date of the judgment's execution by a legal officer (usually carried out by the city constable or sergeant), and the date the
execution was returned to the court by the officer. Race is not indicated for plaintiffs or defendants. Early volumes of these books are simply called "judgment lien dockets," and record amounts but not the full details about the execution of judgments.
Other materials in bound volumes include a book of "Miscellaneous Liens," and a set of "Memorandum Books," which basically recorded applications to serve as administrators and executors of wills, as guardians for children, and as notary publics.
Loose Papers (unbound materials)
The Charlottesville city courthouse has kept more of its original materials than the county courthouse. The loose papers the city holds from early this century, however, are sometimes highly disorganized, with legal documents collected haphazardly into
file drawers. Opening drawers with tantalizing titles sometimes reveals legal papers of varying sorts, requiring patience and some fortitude to determine the actual contents of the drawers. The records discussed below describe file drawers where labels
roughly correlate with contents. Some do not require description. The city, for example, still holds dozens of drawers of original wills and deeds, which duplicate those found in bound volumes. Loose papers are not indexed.
Most are only arranged roughly chronologically, with the exception of chancery court papers, which are arranged by case number.
Chancery Papers (Ended Causes)
The final decisions from courts of chancery are recorded in chancery order books, but these file drawers hold the case papers upon which each order is based. Case papers can prove extremely valuable in tracing family histories,
as witnesses often unfolded detailed and elaborate genealogies when discussing claims on an estate. Sometimes, anecdotes of relationships between family members are revealed as well.
Executions (Returned and Not Returned)
A number of file drawers hold hundreds and hundreds of orders from judges, usually to the city sergeant or constable, to carry out a decision of the court. Most often, this required the legal officer to turn property or money over
from the losing party to a lawsuit to the winning party. Little information is available from these documents that cannot be found in the law order books, though they can help confirm whether an order was actually executed.
Bonds
Anytime an individual needed to leave security with the state to perform a legal duty, he or she or they did so through the legal instrument of a bond. The bonds held by the Charlottesville city courthouse cover a whole range of issues,
from people wishing to become executors of wills (after 1922, other application materials related to overseeing the business of an estate are in a file drawer labeled "Memorandum of Facts") to guardianship papers to churches
filing legally to perform state-recognized marriages. Also included in bond drawers are liquor license bonds (from 1901-1914), with individuals running bars and pool halls applying for permission to sell alcohol. Most of the time, there is a record of e
ach bond filed in the law order books.
The originals give little new information, though they do indicate the names of all parties to a bond.
Ended Causes (Law and Commonwealth)
Over a dozen file drawers at the courthouse hold the case papers for civil and criminal cases dating back to the city's incorporation in 1888. It is easiest to use these papers in conjunction with the law order books, which record their outcomes.
Papers for civil cases often hold detailed accounts of the financial claims at stake, formal demands for payment, and requests to the state for assistance in procuring that payment, while criminal cases (which are filed in the courthouse only until 1917)
hold documents ranging from search and arrest warrants to indictments to jury and witness summonses. Generally, these papers do not hold actual trial transcripts, limiting their usefulness. Still, especially the criminal case papers could
yield interesting information about who committed crimes of what type and where those crimes generally occurred. Tracing the racial identification of witnesses and accused criminals could prove fascinating as well.
Lunacy Commission Papers
Beginning early in the twentieth century, these drawers hold hundreds of state questionnaires filled out by doctors determining an individual's sanity and the possibility of committing him or her to an asylum.
Questionnaires are three pages long and provide detailed information about individuals, including their race, age, occupation, education, members of their families, whether they owned property, and if they smoked or drank, in addition to specific
information about their mental faculties and treatment.
Fascinating questions could be asked about how doctors discussed insanity among blacks and whites, about the class status of individuals committed, and about medical facilities and treatment available to
whites and blacks at both the local and state levels, among others.
This is a valuable trove of materials and well worth the time of researchers.
Abstracts of Votes
Three file drawers are labeled "abstracts of votes," including one drawer dated 1903 to 1929. For the most part, these drawers seem to contain returns of local voting commissioners reporting how many people voted for or against a particular candidate or
ballot issue. These reports could provide the foundation for useful analyses of voting by neighborhood, getting to a level even smaller than the ward. In conjunction with the census and other materials, it might be possible to
determine how African Americans voted in comparison with whites or how people of different class status expressed their political views through voting. These drawers also hold other materials related to voting. The drawer labeled "1902-1929,"
for example, contains a number of broadsides listing black and white voters by ward according to their poll tax payments from 1903 to 1907. Other treasures like these might be found in the file drawers of the courthouse.
Miscellaneous File Drawers
Below is a list of the labeled file drawers at the city courthouse not discussed above. These drawers often seem to hold random collections of documents in addition to what their labels suggest. Loose papers like these at the
courthouse need to be surveyed and organized, but an enterprising researcher might find sorting through them worth his or her efforts:
"Search Warrants and Affidavits, 1920-1940s"
"1891-1895 Records"
"Warrants in Debt and 1894 Maps"
"Inquisitions, 1888-1937, 1938-1939, 1940- "
"Miscellaneous 1890-1915, Voters List, Judge Trustees, Ferre Facias, Sue Papers"
"Voters Registration--Transfers, Absentee Ballot Lists" (2 drawers)