Background of the Research on John Counts of Glade Hollow

If you perform a quick search on one of the major genealogical websites for John Counts of Glade Hollow, you will find an array of different research with various parents assigned to him and different maiden names for his wife Mary Magdalena.  What we do know for 100% fact, the parentage of John Counts is unknown and his wife's original maiden name is unknown!  That is worth repeating, the parents of John Counts are unknown at the present time and the maiden name of his wife Mary Magdalena is also unknown despite what you may find on the internet.  

The goal of this website is to share the most current research on John Counts Sr. of Glade Hollow and to uncover his early history.  Using the research provided by Elihu J. Sutherland years ago as a starting point, our team of genealogists have pushed the timeline of known information pertaining to John Counts back even further.  Ultimately, the goal of this team is to discover the parents of John Counts and to identify the maiden name of his wife Mary Magdalena.

Elihu J. Sutherland, in the early 20th century with only basic genealogy tools available at that time, was able to trace John Counts back to the early 1760s.  Sutherland found a handful of records in what was then Frederick County, Virginia, now Page County, that involved John Counts.  Sutherland found John Counts purchased land at the mouth of the Hawksbill River in 1765 where it intersected the south branch of the Shenandoah River.  Sutherland also found a civil suit from February 1764 involving John Counts against one John Stacy which proved to be the earliest record he would uncover.  Mr. Sutherland was performing this research in the 1930s, 40s and 50s of course prior to the internet or any widely available indexes.  To find these records, Sutherland made at least one trip from his Clintwood home to the Shenandoah Valley, a ten-hour journey then, to search the courthouse records of the area.  His feats for the time were quite remarkable.  

Sutherland's research was accurate although not complete due to his lack of exposure to the vast number of records that became available after his passing.  Most later researchers of John Counts took the information provided by Sutherland as definitive and assumed no other information could be located.  Now with the many tools available to genealogists and record sets at our fingertips, our team has uncovered many earlier records of John Counts that trace him back to 1749!