I am very pleased to present you with the Virginia African American Griots site. If you have any information to share with the site, or if you have any suggestions, or if you would like to help in any way with the site, please contact me. My name is Alice Warner and my email is EmbryProject@gmail.com I am not African American myself, but I am dedicated to preserving that heritage and have known many people very disappointed with the lack of resources available for African American research. Although I manage these pages, they are really *your* pages, for you, the researcher. If you think something needs to be done "better" or "differently"-- just let me know. I can't fix something I don't know is broken.

Virginia, unlike most states, is divided into counties *and* Independent Cities which are not part of counties. Some of these cities are small enough, or have records that have been merged enough, that I will put that city's information in with a county. That city will still appear in the list on the left-- it will just link to the joint page for it and the county. An example is Winchester City and Frederick County. Winchester is very connected to Frederick County history, so they will have a joint page, but you will see both on the left. This way if you are looking for an independent city (and cannot find out what county, since there is none) you will still find the correct page. If you don't see what you're looking for in terms of County/City, check DEFUNCT COUNTIES in the list. If you STILL can't find it, Email me EmbryProject@gmail.com so I can try to sort it out. Tell me it is the griots project, and tell me what county you are looking for.

Information is broken down by county or city, and you can find the names along the left. As you can see we are really just starting out with Virginia, although there has been a barebones website up for sometime, so this will take a while to build into an amazing website. Statewide Resources are listed below. Don't forget to check out the VAGenweb and the Virginia USGenweb Archives for information. Some African American information is probably there that is not linked on this site, due to the high number of documents that do not mention race at all. I have gone through the archives and VAGenweb pages to link on the county pages to items that I think are of African American research interest-- but I'm sure there are plenty of records that I didn't realize were African American, since I'm not intimately familiar with every African American Virginia family.