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Nansemond County, in Virginia's Tidewater region, was formed from Upper Norfolk County in 1637. The county’s official records were totally destroyed by fires in 1734, 1779, and 1866. The town of Suffolk was founded in 1742; it eventually merged with Nansemond County to become the present-day independent city of Suffolk in 1974. The records on file at the Suffolk City Court, however, go back only to 1866.

The work at hand, originally published in 1963 and itself now quite scarce, represents a valiant effort to reconstruct something of Nansemond's genealogical heritage from the records of its surrounding counties—Isle of Wight, Southampton, and Norfolk in Virginia; and Gates County in North Carolina—and from records in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Norfleet begins with a very helpful essay outlining the history and bibliography of Suffolk and Nansemond County. This is followed by the core of the book, namely, the contents of nearly 100 Bibles, arranged alphabetically according to the surname of each Bible’s owner, and, thereunder, in progressions of marriages, births, and deaths. In all, more than 1,000 mostly 18th- and 19th-century inhabitants of Suffolk and Nansemond are here rescued from obscurity and further made accessible in the index to Bible records at the back.

In addition to the Bible records, Mr. Norfleet also transcribed the following vital information on persons from Suffolk and Nansemond, amounting to another 1,000 persons: household members from the 1860 federal census; marriages recorded in the Nansemond County Marriage Register, Volume I; marriage records for Suffolk and Nansemond from the neighboring counties; a handful of surviving Nansemond County will abstracts; death notices from the Norfolk Gazette and Public Ledger, 1804–1816; and several other miscellaneous lists.

By any accounting, this is the first book to turn to when beginning your Nansemond County genealogy.