Work Progress Administration Historical Inventory

WPA Documents for Dinwiddie Circuit Court

The Dinwiddie Circuit Court Clerks in 2012 undertook a project to electronically format Dinwiddie's WPA papers. Below are the electronic/pdf versions of the documents in the Clerk's Office. The documents contain a linked electronic index for easy searching. The documents are large in size and may take a while to load but once loaded you can save them to your computer.

Dinwiddie/Petersburg WPA Pages

  • Contains information about Graveyards, Home Sites, Cemeteries, Churches, and other Historic Items in Dinwiddie and Petersburg.

Blandford Cemetery WPA Pages

  • Contains names and information about individuals buried in Blandford Cemetery.

Library of Virginia WPA Site

  • The Library of Virginia site has information about WPA pages throughout Virginia.

Instructions/Tips for searching Dinwiddie/Petersburg WPA Pages

  1. Select the Dinwiddie/Petersburg WPA Pages. The books may take a few minutes to load.
  2. Once the document has loaded you can save them to your computer for future use and viewing without having to download again.
  3. When viewing the document it is recommended to use the Bookmarks side bar.
  4. The document is laid in three sections on the Bookmarks side bar.
    1. WPA Index
      1. The first 9 pages are the Index for Dinwiddie and Petersburg. It was electronically reformatted and lists all the titles and names contained in WPA Pages. The document is linked to automatically jump to the correseponding page number. There is no need to scroll through each page.
    2. WPA Pages - Dinwiddie
      1. This section contains the Dinwiddie pages that corresponds with the index. If you click on the link in the index pages it will take you directly to the page number and there is no need to scroll through each page.
    3. WPA Pages - Petersburg
      1. This section contains the Petersburg pages that corresponds with the index. If you click on the link in the index pages it will take you directly to the page number and there is no need to scroll through each page.
  5. Note: It may be possible to do a name search without using the typed index by using the 'Find' feature. To use the find feature hit 'control + f' at the same time and type in the word you are searching. It is recommended that you use this feature in conjunction with typed index because this feature may not be 100% accurate.

More information about WPA Pages

Originally organized in 1935 as part of the Federal Writers Project, the Historical Records Survey (HRS) documented resources for research into American History. It later became a unit of the Research and Records Program in 1939. The HRS was responsible for creating the soundex indexes of the federal census which genealogists today have come to rely so heavily on. The HRS also compiled indexes of vital statistics, cemetery interments, school records, military records, maps, newspapers, and the list went on and on. Microfilms of these indexes were later made by other organizations.

Library of Virginia

Wikipedia