town and should not be demolished.

town and should not be demolished.

Donations have helped to pay for renovations in the little building, and the upstairs is still under renovation. A few years ago there was an infestation of bats, said Mrs. Knuepfer, but that problem has been solved.

During the 1970s the society was not very active, but when Howard and Helen Holschuh came to the county, they were influential in bringing the society back to life, said Mrs. Knuepfer. One thing they did was set up a filing system using the 1850 census. Mr. Holschuh is the President of

‘We have a great

interest in what goes

on in the county and

do a lot of service in

the county. ’

— Catheryn Knuepfer

the society, and Mrs. Holschuh is the Secretary. She is presently doing research on war veterans. Only one person is actually employed at the society, and that is Kim Hllis. the secretary .

Mrs. Knuepfer is a professional librarian and volunteered to make a working library. She said that she had plenty of help, and people donated books and gave money to buy more books for the society. "We collect whatever we can find on births, deaths and marriages,’' she said.

There is plenty of colonial history, and information about wars, including the War of 1812 and the Civil War. “We have regional histories of the units that were formed in this county in the Civil War. Many from this county rode with Mosby,” said Mrs. Knuepfer. There is also information on Stonewall Jackson and Jed Hotchkiss, who was Mr. Jackson’s cartographer.

There are a lot of family genealogies on file, in publications and on disk. The periodical Virginia Genealogist is available, and many old photographs are also on tile.

There are always projects in progress at the society. They are almost ready to start publication of the county 's record of cemeteries. The cemetery committee, headed up by Frances Thornton, has located well over 100 old field cemeteries, and documented them with photographs and written information from the headstones. Many graves are marked only with field stones with no name or date. One interesting thing discovered during the cemetery search was that many children died in 1862. Mrs. Knuepfer said that must have been due to cholera, measles and typhoid. The society has an index of the cemeteries by surname. Once all the information is entered into the computer, a publisher will be decided upon.

Birth records date back to 1833, with some missing around the 1850’s. They also have names of slaves on record before emancipation. Rappahannock is one of two counties in the state that have records of marriages that were required by the Freedman’s Bureau, said Mrs. Knuepter. She said the Freedman’s Bureau was set up so that freed slaves could take their place in society.

I