In the beginning, the only way to search the Southampton County records, was to journey to the Court House, and view the records in person. Only the most die hard of Genealogists made the effort. Most others used the published summaries of others research.

Then in 2009-2010, The Brantley Association of America changed everything! They imaged and indexed all the early court records of Southampton County. These files contain approximately 365,000 names mapped to over 57,000 pages of record images. Now the records were available to all with internet access. But to find a particular record, the indexes still had to be manually searched to identify the name, book, and page number where a record was located.

Next, in 2018, Rodney Hatfield created the first search tool for the Southampton County files. The Alfred Lee Hatfield Genealogy Records Search Tool includes the ability to search for a record by name, date, and record book. The tool is spreadsheet-based and available here.

Then in 2020, by entering a name or a site in the STP search tool, every record containing a indexed name or site could be located and displayed in a table containing 1) a link to the line in the index containing the name, 2) the target of the search in a link to supplemental information, and 3) links to images of the pages containing the search. Not satisfied with just the Brantley file, STP started to include records held by the Library of Virginia.

Now, in 2021, we introduce "normalized names" and phonetic search with ranking of search results. STP continues to develop new features of the search tool, so you should expect the tool to evolve over time. For example, currently we do not search bios or transcript text but we are working to bring you those capabilities.

This site is relatively young, so our collection of transcripts is limited but growing, but even if there is no transcript available, the page image is only a single click away.

A search of the Southampton County records starts 1) by entering the Name of the person, place, or thing you are searching for in the search form below. The form has two fields for names and a search term must be entered in one or more fields. The form can be used to search for any entity (person, site, or thing) that has an entry in the indices.

2) Next, choose the type of search (Literal, Grep (default), Soundex, Metaphone, or MeteSoundex) to preform.

3) Then, choose to search for either page images or transcripts of records.

4) Finally, choose the records to search and 5) press the search button.

How to search for a person.

Let's use the Dunkley's of Southampton as an example. Entering "Dunkley" in the surName field finds every record that refers to a Dunkley. There are There are 6 names in 5 books containing 40 pages that match the search term..

To narrow the search, we can enter a first name in the given Name Field. Let's find the records pertaining to John by adding John in the Given Name Field. There are 3 books containing 9 pages that match the search term.

The search accepts regular expressions. We can expand the search to include John and his wife Catherine by entering "(John|Catherine)" in the Given Name field. The search returns 6 records. Catherine's maiden Name was Joyner. The search can be expanded bu entering "(Dunkley|Joyner)" in the surName field

How to search for a site

To search for a site, enter the site type and/or name into the form. For example, Millfield has played a prominent role in Southampton history. Entering Millfield in the Site Name field yields 11 search results including Millfield Church and Millfield Academy.

To search for all Academies, enter "Academy\*" into the Site Type search field. Since Academies are Sites, we have to append the site tag, *. (Since "*" is has special meaning in regular expressions, it must be escaped with the character "\"). The search yields 16 results.

Finally, to search for just Millfield Academy, enter "Academy\*" into the Site Type search field and "Millfield" into the Site Name field. The search returns two results.

How to search for a entities that have a tag

We use tags to classify certain entries in the index. For example, we use "*" as a tag to identify sites and "^" to identify Native Americans. Unfortunately some of the tags we use also have special meaning for regular expression searches. There are 12 characters with special meanings for regular expressions: the backslash \, the caret ^, the dollar sign $, the period or dot ., the vertical bar or pipe symbol |, the question mark ?, the asterisk or star *, the plus sign +, the opening parenthesis (, the closing parenthesis ), the opening square bracket [, and the opening curly brace {, These special characters are often called “metacharacters”.

If you want to use any of these characters as a literal character in your search, you need to "escape" them with a backslash. For example, if you want to find the Nottoway Swamp, the correct search is surName/Site Type="Swamp\*"" and Given Name/Site Name="Nottoway"". Without the backslash, the * has a special meaning and no results are returned. Note: One could use surName/Site Type="Swamp." to obtain similar results."

Each column in the table contains links to addition information about the match.

Column one contains a link to the line in the index or table of content containing the search term.

Column two contains a link to biographic or other supplemental information about the match.

Column three contains links to images or transcripts of the pages in the records containing the match.