It was the first fruit of the ambitious plan of Nell Marion Nugent, custodian of the Land Office from 1928 to 1958, to abstract and index the patent books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and to publish the abstracts in a series of five volumes. The published first volume contained information from patent books 1 through 5, and her abstracts of patent books 6 through 14 were set in type for publication, but circumstances caused the project to be abandoned, and eventually the type was destroyed. Only the corrected page proofs survived to be deposited in the Library of Virginia along with the records of the Land Office at midcentury. To reset more than 800 pages of type was financially impossible, and so those two volumes were reproduced directly from the aging corrected page proofs. As a result, on some pages spots are visible, and faded type leaves some words obscured and difficult to read.
Researchers have two options for recovering illegible information.
You may also search database indexes to the Land Office Patents and Grants and examine digitized images of the original land patents at the Digital Library Program Home Page. Volumes one through three of Cavaliers and Pioneers are published by the Library of Virginia. Individual volumes or the complete set are available from your local bookseller or from the Library Shop of the Library of Virginia.