About

Valerie Schmidt-Wilson became the Archivist and Conservator of Isle of Wight County historic court documents in the wake of the Family Search digitization efforts in 2012. Disturbed by the state that our documents were left in, Valerie began the ISLE OF WIGHT COUNTY RECORDS PROJECT. It was her mission to repair, preserve, organize and also learn about the old records our ancestors wrote, in a time forgotten.
When the local held loose paper was conserved and archived, County Clerk Sharon Jones reclaimed thousands of original documents from the Library of Virginia where they were held in a warehouse, completely inaccessible, and waiting to dissolve into dust. Thanks to Valerie’s design and implementation of the RECORDS PROJECT, those hidden papers are nearly all conserved, images of those amazing original documents are also now available to the public, and the original papers can be viewed by appointment.
Early in the RECORDS PROJECT, Valerie recognized the amazing information contained in many of those long-forgotten documents that were penned by our ancestors from the mid-1700s through the Civil War. The information, therein, tells a much fuller story about the early history of the county, and sheds very significant light on Valerie’s most passionate research project—the history of IOW County as it relates to the Tynes family, the house that Robert Tynes built in 1750, and the 1802 emancipation of 81 of Timothy Tynes’ slaves.
On Sunday June 22 at 2:00 pm Valerie will share some of the amazing things she has learned about the Tynes, the Old Brick House which she and her husband now own, the local population, and the famous emancipation of 81 Slaves in the 1802 WILL of Timothy Tynes. She will also talk about her growing, specifically documented database designed to help the descendants of the Black Tynes family in their quest to find their roots.