Since its publication in 1958 this work has been regarded as an important source-book for colonial Virginia genealogy. It contains transcriptions of numerous historical documents and provides a great deal of out-of-the-way information pertaining to Virginians of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, much of it previously unknown. It is the product, in fact, of the compiler's researches into the by-ways of the Public Record Office in London, in particular his investigations of the reports sent from Virginia to the Colonial Office--an investigation into the very marrow of Virginia history.