Fellow George Harrison Sanford King (1914-1985) is the 2019 inductee into the National Genealogy Hall of Fame. He was nominated by the Virginia Genealogical Society, and the announcement was made at NGS’s 2019 Family History Conference dinner held in St. Charles, Missouri on May 10, 2019.

A native and lifelong resident of Fredericksburg, Va., George was elected a Fellow in 1947 as No. 53 on the Roll.

George was an expert on the complex family relationships of Virginia’s Northern Neck, an area that includes what are often referred to as burned counties. In 1938 George began a series of articles for Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine entitled “Copies of Extant Wills from Counties Whose Records Have Been Destroyed.” This series, which contained extensive genealogical notes and pedigrees, ran until the Quarterly was discontinued in 1951.

Using numerous sources, he made extensive notes and transcriptions on early Virginia families. A card index to his more than 100,000 papers is available at the Virginia Historical Society and abstracts are being published in the Magazine of Virginia Genealogy. The card index and all papers have been scanned and are freely available on FamilySearch (familysearch.org/search/catalog/1878857. In the catalogue, the first fifteen DGS numbers lead to the card file; the rest of the DGS entries lead to the papers). George published numerous other genealogical and historical articles and authored several books.

In the ASG Newsletter (vol. 43 no. 2 [June 1985]), Milton Rubincam quoted part of his obituary in The Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg:

Mr. King was widely respected for his outstanding knowledge of Virginia history and old Virginia families. He often astounded people by reciting lineages from memory, a gift that made him a popular figure at family reunions. While he had a talent for entertaining with humorous stories of the past, his approach to genealogy was strictly scholarly . . . A stickler for detail, he frequently denounced family histories that he felt were based more on conjecture than existing record. “Family stories are nice but they usually have little to do with fact,” he once said.

George has been added to the list of Fellows named to the National Genealogical Society Hall of Fame.