1790 Virginia Census

The original 1790 and 1800 census record for Virginia were destroyed when the British Army set fire to much of Washington, D.C. in August 1814. Details such as the heads of households and the number of inhabitants in each household were lost with only summaries containing the number of inhabitants of each county surviving. In 1908 the Bureau of the Census published a twelve-volume compilation of names of heads of households, reconstructed from surviving (and incomplete) state records, entitled Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States taken in the year 1790: Records of the State Enumerations, 1782-1785: Virginia.

This document, along with 1790 census records for other states, is located at the site which is linked to below.

Note: This link will take you outside this blog and Blogspot. If you have a tabbed browser, I would recommend opening it in a separate tab, which your browser may do in any event, depending on the browser you are using and how it is configured; otherwise, use your browser's back-button to return.

Note Also: These files, available in both .zip and PDF format, are many tens of megabytes in size and are most definitely not recommended for users who do not have broadband Internet access.

To visit the site: Click Here.

In 1940 a supplementary compilation entitled Virginia Tax Payers, 1782-87 Other Than Those Published by the United States Census Bureau by Augusta B. Fothergill and John M. Naugle was published in Richmond, Virginia. This volume does not appear to be available online but can be found in many reference libraries.

Also of interest is The 1787 Census of Virginia: An Accounting of the Name of Every White Male Tithable Over 21 Years by Netti Schreiner-Yantis and Florence Speakman Love, published in Springfield, Virginia in 1987, which is based on the 1787 Virginia personal property tax lists.