Much of the original manuscript material upon which an account of the period must be based has been published in the following sources: William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large; being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia, Vol. I (Richmond, 1809), H. R. McIlwaine, Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia, 1622-1632, 1670-1676 (Richmond, 1924), H. R. McIlwaine, Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1619-1658/59 (Richmond, 1914), Nell Marion Nugent, Cavaliers and Pioneers: Abstracts of Virginia Land Patents and Grants, 1623-1666 (Richmond, 1934), Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (Richmond, 1893 to present), William and Mary Quarterly (Williamsburg, 1892 to present), The Southern Literary Messenger, January 1845 (documents on the recall of Governor Berkeley by the Burgesses and Council of Virginia in 1660), and W. Noel Sainsbury, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 1574-1660, Preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty's Public Record Office (London, 1860). The essential guide to most of this material is Earl G. Swern, Virginia Historical Index, 2 vols. (Roanoke, 1934).
The most important unpublished manuscript materials of the period are the county records, some of which are complete from the earliest period of settlement. Originals or transcripts of the county records are available in the Virginia State Library, Richmond. Another important source of unpublished manuscript material for the period is the "Virginia, Book No. 43" manuscript in the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C., which contains numerous commissions and proclamations for the period 1626-1634. Among the Virginia papers of the Barons of Sackville, Knole Park, are a few documents relating to the period which have not been printed either in the documentary articles in the American Historical Review, XXVII (1922), Nos. 3-4, or elsewhere. They are now available on microfilm in the Library of Congress, having been photographed by the British Manuscripts Project of the American Council of Learned Societies.
Important unpublished dissertations include James Kimbrough Owen, "The Virginia Vestry: A Study in the Decline of a Ruling Class" (Ph. D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1947), and Edna Jensen, "Sir John Harvey: Governor of Virginia" (M. A. thesis, University of Virginia, 1950).
