Some person on this list recently was searching for a family in Washington Co., VA. Washington Co., according to the Family History Library Catalog (PLACE search) Formed in 1776 from Fincastle County. Part of Montgomery County was added later About Fincastle Co., this info: Formed in 1772 from Botetourt County. It became extinct in 1776 when it was divided to form Montgomery, Washington, and Kentucky counties. Some records are kept by Montgomery County. It looks to me this person is going to have to research a LOT of counties. As a subscriber on another rootsweb constantly reminds us, PLACE is most important in finding your ancestors. I would add DATE also. Too frequently, we as genealogists want to get back to the immigrant ancestor, when we don't know anything about our great-grandparents [who, surprisingly, may have been cousins, as I discovered with my own paternal grandparents!!!] Some advice I got long ago from a topnotch genealogist headquartered in Salt Lake City: If you are researching in Virginia, search ALL the counties. At first, I thought, there is no time in the world to search all the counties. I have since found that if I don't keep an open mind, I may quite overlook my common-named ancestors [many of them] in LOTS of Virginia counties. Not only did the county boundaries change, as indicated above, but as the families wore out the land, they say, with planting tobacco, they moved on--some of them to North Carolina in pre-Revolutionary days, and to Kentucky after the Revolution. And lots of people moved around as the Redcoats came into their neighborhoods--at least, tradition says!! E.W.Wallace