I intend to use county courthouse records for my web site. The purpose of the web site is to put those records about free persons of color in antebellum Virginia into some context about how the laws of Virginia affected family life of free non-whites. Therefore, I do not expect to have copyright issues since I will be using government records.
Since this is not a records collection or research site, I do not expect the site to contain a lot of records. The idea of the site is induce reflection not collection. Therefore, I fully expect to type the records and use meta-data for search by name, county/city, type of record, etc. I would certainly consider using XML if I found tags that would be helpful.
This is not a site that I would expect to be preserved. All the records will continue to be in county courthouses and the Library of Virginia.
