Research Methodology Statement

This website is a product of several “generations” of student researchers in Dr. LaDale Winling’s Public History graduate course at Virginia Tech. Over the course of several semesters, students spent hours poring between deeds in the Montgomery County Courthouse Records Room and our own expanding database of racially restrictive covenants. As researchers, we adopted several different methods to acquire them, many of which had been passed down from our predecessors. The proposed methodology was based on successful research into racial housing covenants in other counties throughout the United States. Unfortunately, each county operates according to its own policies and thus has different ways of storing their land records. One of the ways in which researchers have discovered racial covenants in other counties is through examination of the grantor-grantee indexes in search of instrument labels that signify agreements for housing subdivisions. In the case of Montgomery County, Virginia, this method was not helpful in finding covenants that applied to entire plats. In fact, we found few covenants which applied to entire subdivisions, with most having instead been associated with individual lots and consequently attached to the corresponding individual deeds. Considering this reality, it would help to explain the methodology which we formulated in our efforts to discover as many covenants as possible.

We first began by engaging in what we termed the “brute force” method. This consisted of opening the 600-to-700 page deed books and flipping through each page in search of the specific language that signified a racially restrictive housing covenant. As tedious as this approach sounds, and most assuredly it was at times, it nevertheless allowed us to comprehensively cover several deed books and it provided the foundation which allowed us to discover scores of racial covenants. On the surface level, we found many covenants through this approach with nine coming from Deed Book 82 alone, for example. But what was most fruitful about this approach was how it generated a list of names of the individuals who were repeatedly involved in transactions containing racial covenants. From this list, we selected individuals whose names appeared most frequently and searched them using the courthouse computers. This approach was merely an evolution of the “brute force” method, albeit a refinement. We consider this the “digital brute force” method. This, in turn, produced a list consisting of all of the land transactions in which they were involved. This allowed us to find, through the digitized grantor books, all of the instances in which prominent real estate actors bought and sold racially restrictive housing. The transactions of Orlando and Juanita Rucker are one of the prime examples of the success of this methodology.

One limitation inherent to this approach is that if the name was not one discovered during the “brute force” phase, then it would not necessarily find its way onto the list of names that would get used during the “digital brute force” phase. As such, there could be large swaths of transactions missed entirely. 

As the development of the website crept closer, we returned to the original “brute force” method to read between the most recognized names in hopes to uncover covenants that had been previously overlooked. This included cracking open deed books that, as of Spring 2025, had not yet been opened, and spending hours deciphering the intricate cursive of many deeds that had not been typed. Truly, this felt like learning a new language. Nonetheless, returning to this method allowed us to capture many covenants that had not been recorded yet, and build our ever-growing spreadsheet.

The method for cataloging the covenants was an evolutionary process too, beginning initially with a spiral-bound notebook and doing our best to find some way to keep track of all the information we discovered. At first we used two different methods, one in which the deed book and page served as a header and all necessary information came beneath it. We also tried to keep track of the covenants by writing line by line, but this method proved unsuccessful as it lacked the space for all pertinent information, such as deed book, page number, date, grantor, grantee. Finally, Bailey designed slips that contained fields for everything we were looking for and the backs were blank, leaving ample room for any notes that could help establish more robust metadata or better explain the transaction in a way the rigid fields could not. Up to five slips fit on a standard 8.5x11 sheet of paper; once printed, the slips were cut out and then held together as a mass by a binder clip. Following the implementation of these slips, every deed containing a racial covenant had its information recorded down using the slips. Once the day was done, slips were organized by book number and page number then entered into the spreadsheet. In gathering data this way, the process felt more organized, as the information was all neatly arranged making it easy to follow when adding to the spreadsheet. 

This research was exploratory in nature, and we consequently were forced to experiment with approaches that had worked in other counties before ultimately devising our own methodology. The experimentation stage reduced the amount of time that could have been spent applying our own methodology, but exploration was a necessary part of the process. While frustrating at times and in no sense should our research be considered comprehensive of the entire county, we were successful nonetheless in finding a significant number of racial covenants and laying a foundation for further research within the housing history of Montgomery County. From the fruitful labor of past and present (and future!) researchers, we are proud to present the beginning stages of a website aptly dedicated to uncovering the racialized housing history of Montgomery County. Of course, as is the nature with history, there is definitely more work to be done.