If your Coats or Coates ancestor lived in Virginia in the late 1700’s, you might find his signature on one of the religious petitions on-line at the Library of Congress website. To find these: - go to the Library of Congress website www.loc.gov - click on the tab for “American Memory” at the top of the page - click on “Religion” in the box on the left hand side - click on “Religious Petitions, Virginia 1764- 1802” These are not indexed by surname, but you can narrow your search by typing the name of the county in Virginia where your ancestor lived to get a list of the petitions for that county. Then click on each one to bring up an image of the petition to scan through to look for your ancestor’s name. For example, I am interested in the Coates and Coats families that lived in Halifax County, Virginia. I followed the above steps to bring up a list of the petitions for Halifax County and found the following petitions: - November 25, 1794 contains the signature of Thos. Coates - November 16, 1795 contains the signatures of Willm. Coats and possibly another one that might be William Coats - December 17, 1799 contains the signatures of Joshua Coates, William Coates jr., John Coats, Richd. Coates, Richard Cotes, and William Cotes - December 21, 1802 contains the signature of Wm. Coates Caution – many of these are original signatures but you need to evaluate that. Sometimes what you will see are several names in a row that look like the same handwriting. In this case, the people signed on a separate sheet of paper when signatures were being collected at a different location. Then the names from that sheet of paper were copied over to this petition. Also, in this time period the term “junior” does not necessarily mean that someone is the son of another person with the same name. “Junior” could mean someone who was younger and had the same name, i.e. a son, or nephew, or cousin, or someone not related at all. Kathryn Hamilton