The objective of STP is to collect and make available to genealogical researchers transcripts of the early court records (from 1749) of Southampton County, Virginia. This STP web site is designed to collect, store, and distribute crowd-sourced transcriptions; that is, user-provided digital versions of the paper records stored at the Southampton County court house, the Library of Virginia or other repositories.

The STP web site allows researchers to both browse and search for images and transcripts of the records of Southampton County. Initially, the STP site contained only an index of the names and places in the Southampton County records. While an index may be of value to some researchers, a transcript is likely to be much more useful. The STP encourages users to share their research by providing a simple method of uploading, storing and sharing their transcripts. By clicking a link on a transcript page, visitors can store and share their transcript with other researchers by uploading it to the STP database. Here is an example of a STP transcript along with its associated image.

Initially, our STP transcripts and images were not searchable, but now every name or place in the early court records can easily located using the STP search engine. So, how would a researcher find the will of their 2nd great grandfather John Dunkley? Click here to see how!
In August 2020, the STP debuted a web-based search tool. Now, all of the records of Southampton County that have been indexed by the Brantley Association can be searched from your favorite web browser. The STP search engine allows searches of images or transcripts containing a name or place and filtered by book type (Marriage, Will, Deed, etc.) Wildcard searches can specified by using regular expression search patterns. See the search results for "John Dunkley" by clicking here.

A search returns a table containing three columns and a line for each record matching the search term. Column one is a link to index containing the search term. Column two contains the name matching the search term and a link to additional information about the match. Column three contains the pages of the match and links to the images or transcripts of the page containing the match.

Future plans are to includes link to transcripts and to expand the range of the search tool to other on-line records of Southampton County.

Here are others tools to help your research
The Brantley Association of America has imaged and indexed all the early court records of Southampton County from 1749 to the early 1880's. The Brantley indices are in Portable Document Format (pdf) and while there is no integrated computer-based search tool, the Brantley Files do allow a user to manually search the indexes for the page and book where Grandfather John's Last Will And Testament was recorded. If the will has been transcribed, it can be found in the STP database with two mouse clicks. Even if is has not been transcribed, one more click will display an computer-enhanced image of the record along with all the names and places found on the page.

The Alfred Lee Hatfield Genealogy Records Search Tool created Rodney Hatfield provides a more robust search capability including the ability to find a record by name, date, and record book. The tool is spreadsheet-based and includes over 365,000 names mapped to over 57,000 pages of record images. Grandfather John's will can be located using the search capability of your favorite spreadsheet program on your computer. As in the Brantley example above, a transcript and image of the record can be located on the STP site with only a few clicks of the mouse.

Don't see the transcription you were looking for? Or maybe you see a transcription error. Then please help by providing a transcription or correction to support@go-stp.com. For guidance on how to submit a transcript to STP, Click here. But before you start, read our guidelines for creating a STP transcripts.

Submit a transcript or correction by sending email to support@go-stp.com with the subject "STP transcription [book] [page]" where book and page are found at the top of each STP transcript web page. Let's use Grandfather John Dunkley's will as an example. Clicking on the link reveals near the top of the page that his Grandfather John's will is contained in in book "Will Book I 1747-1762" on the page "Page 1". So if one wished to submit a transcript or correction, send an email to support@go-stp.com with the subject "STP Transcription Project Will Book 1 1747-1762 Page 1". We use a simi-automated process to update the database, so the format of the subject line is important to us. Of course, we try to make submitting transcripts easy by providing a pre-formatted link at the bottom of each page. Scroll down on the example to reveal the link.

Transcripts should be provided as unformatted text without any attachments or external links. The recommended format is as in the example and summarized below.
Line 1: Book and page
Line 2: blank
Line 3: Name and Place entries on this page include:
Line 4: Name and Place entries (can be cut from STP web page)
Line 5: blank
Line 6: Start of transcript. Be as accurate as possible. Use the spellings as found in the record. If uncertain, use a ?. For example: a five letter word starting with t would be "t????". Use the punctuation, capitalization, abbreviations, and format as found in the record.
End the transcription with any notes that my be important to other researchers. Enclose notes between brackets (i.e., [This is a note.]). Be sure to note transcription errors (like a name indexed incorrectly).

Now, are you ready to get started? Then click here to browse in the STP reading room or here to search for a record or transcript.

Note: These documents include transcriptions of names and places from the spellings used by the court clerks. In some cases, a name or place may appear more than once; first as entered by the clerks of court, and then when known to be spelled another way, or when the entry has evolved over time, or when the transcription is known to be in error.