In 1796, the Mutual Assurance Society (MAS) began issuing insurance policies to property owners against fire damage. The original policies from 1796 to 1867 are held at the Library of Virginia and the University of Mary Washington (UMW) holds copies on 23 reels of microfilm. In 2023, the present-day Mutual Assurance Society of Virginia funded the digitization of the microfilm. UMW’s Simpson Library is currently using the images from the scanning project to build a public digital collection for this resource.
The digital collection follows the same organizational structure as the physical volumes and microfilm reels. The policies are bound into volumes, and each reel contains a group of volumes. New volumes are added to the collection as staff complete the processing workflows. An automatically generated transcript is available for each policy.
To locate a specific policy based on policyholder name, address, structure type, etc., we recommend using the UMW Center for Historic Preservation's electronic index. The index results will provide the reel and volume that contain a specific policy.
For more information about this collection, visit our project and transcript documentation pages. For more information about the Mutual Assurance Society Policies, in general, and how they were created, visit the electronic index context pages.