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Warren County (Va.) Judgments, 1836-1969 [series or volume title]. Local government records collection, Warren County Court Records. The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Va. 23219.
These items came to the Library of Virginia in shipments of court papers from Warren County in accession Number 37019 in 1999 as well as under an undated accession.
Prior to 2026, the judgement descriptive records were not standardized in their inclusion of contextual information or content lists. Local Records staff reviewed this record and have updated to current standards as of 2026.
Encoded by L. Jones: 2013; updated by J. Taylor: April 2026.
Context for Record Type: Judgments are identified as civil suits, often involving debt, heard by a jury on the "law" side of the court as opposed to the "chancery" (or equity) side. Should the defendant not have funds to repay the debt, the court ordered their property (including enslaved people) to be seized and sold to repay the debt owed to the plaintiff. Judgments also contain suits brought by enslaved people seeking to gain their freedom.
In Judgments, an assumpsit or declaration (sometimes referred to as a narratio) lays out the plaintiff's grievance as a petition acted as a formal application to the court requesting judicial action. Judgment suits also generally included record types like subpoenas, summons, and exhibit. Judgments may also include additional documentations such as executions, bonds, and various kinds of writs.
Judgment suits make up a large quantity of a locality's records; consequently, they provide a great deal of information concerning the activities and interests of the people who lived in the locality. Since the vast majority of judgment suits relate to financial matters, they are a valuable resource in studying the economic and social history of Virginia localities and are the impotence for many chancery suits.
The County Court was the original colonial court of adjudication and recordation, and it was the principal tribunal for the administration of local justice. The individual justices could act on small claims matters as well as criminal matters where imminent bodily harm was a possibility, there being an appeal to the full County Court, which met monthly. This court ceased to exist in 1904 and the recordation function was transferred to the circuit court.
Warren County (Va.) Judgments, 1836-1969 contains civil cases in which justice was administered on the strictly formulated rules of common law. The majority of these cases in this record series relate to matters of debt. The records consist of various levels of processed loose records and volumes.
This collection is arranged into two series:
Additional Warren County Court Records can be found on microfilm at The Library of Virginia web site. Consult
All records in this record series are unprocessed and remain tri-folded within their original bundles; the bundles also include other court records, such as commonwealth causes, road and bridge records, tax and fiscal records, Overseers of the Poor, etc. Not all record types will be found in every bundle of papers. The contents of the boxes are not arranged in any particular order and dates may overlap between boxes. Some records may be fragile.
These records either belong to a court which has not been identified or the records belong to multiple courts which were combined at some point in time.
The court in which these volumes were used have not been identified.