I just returned from a visit to Berks County Courthouse where I was researching my German ancestors who arrived in the 1740s and 1750s. What a disappointment to find that Berks Co. does not have records from (or at least that I could find) before the Revolutionary War and records from 1775-1790 were very scarce indeed. Does anyone know why these records (deeds and wills) are missing? I have copies of land transactions from Bucks County dating from the 1680s and here in Virginia they have wills and deeds from the 1620s. A genealogy friend suggested that the earlier Berks Co. records were possibly destroyed in a fire. I did turn up in the Schuylkill Co. courthouse three deeds that were signed in 1781, 1801, and 1810 but were not recorded until 1900! Strange indeed since those years were before Schuylkill was made a county out of old Berks (1811). FYI: the Sch. Co. courthouse has all their deeds computerized so that retrieving and making copies was quite effortless. The Berks Co. employees in the deed office were not familiar with requests for documents from the 1700s although they did finally find one deed from 1777, that was good news, but the bad news was that on the microfilm it is just about illegible and all attempts to copy it came out poorly. Barbara Welch Burke, VA