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Appomattox County, Virginia was formed in 1845 from Buckingham, Campbell, Charlotte, and Prince Edward counties. Some twenty years later the county's name would become a household word because it was at the Appomattox County Courthouse that General Lee surrendered to General Grant, ending the American Civil War.

In 1948, longtime Appomattox County resident and amateur historian Nathaniel Featherston prepared a history of the county which included nearly 200 pages devoted to photographs of his contemporaries and to the military service records of Appomattox County residents who served in the Spanish American and two World Wars. In the interest of economy, we have omitted those pages, retaining Featherston's general history of Appomattox and hundreds of family histories. Our excerpted work bears the new title, Appomattox County History and Genealogy.

While Mr. Featherston's annals of old Appomattox are not without historical interest, genealogists will surely wish to pour over the family histories for clues to their own ancestry. Featured in the historical narrative are sketches of Appomattox's ante bellum leadership, a first-hand account of the Confederate surrender from the diary of the author's grandmother, a map which reconstructs the buildings of the county seat in 1865, treatises on the county's businesses, educational system and churches, and brief biographies of the white and African-American civic leaders of the author's day. Of still greater interest, of course, are the numerous genealogies of varying length of Appomattox County families, a representative sampling of which would include: Abbitt, Agee, Alvis, Anderson, Austin, Babcock, Bagby, Baker, Baldwin, Barnard, Beard, Bell, Bingham, Blackwell, Booker, Bondurant, Browning, Burge, Burkey, Burnett, Caldwell, Caldwell, Carson, Carter, Cawthorn, Cheathan, Chenault, Childers, Chilton, Christian, Coleman, Conner, Covington, Davidson, Davis, Dickerson, Doss, Drinkard, Farmer, Featherston, Ferguson, Fleshman, Flood, Ford, Franklin, Furbush, Garrett, Gilliam, Goin, Gordon, Guill, Gunter, Hamilton, Hancock, Harding, Harvey, Henderson, Hicks, Hunter, Hughes, Inge, Jamerson, Jennings, Johnson, Jones, Kinney, Langran, Lawson, Legrande, Lewis, Lucado, Mann, Marks, Marshall, Martin, Megginson, Mitchell, Moore, Morris, Moses, McCormick, McKinney, Nash, Nowlin, O'Brien, Page, Patterson, Paulett, Perdue, Phelps, Plunkett, Ransom, Reynolds, Richardson, Robertson, Robinson, Rogers, Scruggs, Shearer, Sims, Smith, Southall, Spencer, Stanley, Staples, Stewart, Stratton, Taylor, Tanner, Thornhill, Thornton, Torrence, Trent, Turner, Walker, Walton, Webb, Wells, Wheeler, White, Wilkes, Wingfield, Woodson, Wooldridge, and Wright.