By the way, what was your ancestor's name? If you wish to research your ancestor who served during the Revolution in the VA militia from Spotsylvania County, I give you below some really good references that will help you. You will need the man's full name and at least month and year of birth and death and place of birth and death so as to be sure to identify YOUR guy and not somebody with the same name. Knowing the name of the militia unit commander will help you a lot, too. Having the paperwork from your man's pension application puts you way ahead of the game, too. Before you go to any library, call and ask if they have these two references I list below, and if they don't have them, DON'T GO THERE, because that means they don't have enough detailed Rev. War reference material to do you much good:

--Virgil D. White, abstractor, "Genealogical Abstracts of Revolutionaly War Pension Files," Waynesboro, Tennessee: The National Historical Publishing Company, 1991. (These are four or five huge volumes arranged alphabetically by last name. You will be surprised how many Rev. War vets had the same name, but you run down the list and look for the ones with "VA militia" immediately after the name and pension claim number. Then you compare all the ones with your ancestor's same first and last name until you find the one whose little write-up matches the stuff in the pension application papers you already have. Piece of cake, right? Of course, we hope your guy is mentioned in this landmark work. I'm sure some guys were left out, but not many. If you find your man in White, it should give you more information than you already have.

--John G. Gwathmey, "Historical Register of Virginians in the Revolution," Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, Inc, 1987. (Look in the index in the back for your ancestor's name and go to those pages. I hope he is there.)

Neil, for your case, these two are the basics. There are lots of others, but these two should get you in the ballpark. Basically, once you are sure of the ancestor's unit name and the commander of that unit, you will want to use whatever Virginia Rev. War reference books they have to see just what detail you can discover. I have seen some references that actually list everybody (well, almost everybody) in certain units, but this kind of thing is specific to each state. I haven't worked much with Rev. War VA militia, but I've seen "VA militia" mentioned often enough in a number of reference books to know somebody went to great trouble to document those guys, which should help your chance or success.

I wish you good hunting, and, if you don't mind, let me have the ancestor's name. You just never know.

Bruce Nichols