In elucidation of the social life and commerce of the period,—the three decades of the seventeenth century,—the following may be named: Letters of Colonel William Fitzhugh, of Stafford County, a lawyer and planter, May 15, 1679-April 29, 1699; Letters of Colonel William Byrd, of the “Falls,” James River, planter and Receiver-General of the colony, January, 1683-Aug. 3, 1691,—in the _Collections_ of the Virginia Historical Society. The following parish records preserved in the library of the Theological Seminary near Alexandria, Va., are valuable sources of early genealogical information; Registers of Charles River Parish, York County,—births 1648-1800, deaths 1665-1787;[309] Vestry Books (some with partial registers) of Christ Church Parish, Middlesex County, 1663-1767; Petsoe Parish, Gloucester County, from June 14, 1677; Kingston Parish, Matthews County, from 1679; St. Peter’s Parish, New Kent County, from 1686. Of such of the early papers in the State archives at Richmond as escaped the casualties of the war, the Commonwealth intrusted the editing to William P. Palmer; and vol. i., covering 1652-1781 (with a very few, however, before 1689), was published in 1875 as _Calendar of State Papers and other Manuscripts preserved in the Capitol at Richmond_.[310] On the life of Captain John Smith in general, some notes are made in another chapter of this volume.[311] It will be remembered that Fuller—in the earliest printed biography of Smith, contained in his _Worthies of England_—says of him, “It soundeth much to the diminution of his deeds, that he alone is the herald to publish and proclaim them.” Mr. Deane first pointed out (1860), in a note to his edition of Wingfield’s _Discourse_, that the story of Pocahontas’s saving Smith’s life from the infuriated Powhatan, which Smith interpolates in his _Generall Historie_, was at variance with Smith’s earlier recitals in the tracts of which that book was composed when they had been issued contemporaneous with the events of which he was treating some years earlier, and that the inference was that Smith’s natural propensity for embellishment, as well as a desire to feed the interest which had been incited in Pocahontas when she visited England, was the real source of the story. Mr. Deane still farther enlarged upon this view in a note to his edition (p. 38) of Smith’s _Relation_ in 1866.[312] It has an important bearing on the question that Hamor, who says so much of Pocahontas, makes no allusion to such a striking service. The substantial correctness of Smith’s later story is contended for by W. Robertson in the _Hist. Mag._, October, 1860; by William Wirt Henry, in _Potter’s American Monthly_, 1875; and a general protest is vaguely rendered by Stevens in his _Historical Collections_, p. 102.