Place name quirks
There is no way among standardized places to choose Brunswick County, Virginia before 1776. (I haven't checked yet if that is also true for other Colonial counties in VA.)
Y'all have "Ninety-Six District" of South Carolina listed as "District 96". It was not a district number; it was named after the town, which you do have spelled out correctly. It got it's name because it was 96 miles following the Indian trail from the Indian village (near Clemson). I'm sure outsiders think the difference is negligible, but it's annoying to natives who know.
Answers
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You have to select Brunswick, Virginia, British Colonial Virginia, County, 1732-1776 instead of Brunswick, Virginia, United States 1776 - Present.
Now, a bit on this plays out with some searches.
- For searching the catalog, you will see no difference in the categories.
- For searching images, which is a really powerful search, it makes all the difference in the world. I gave a presentation several weeks ago where I showed just how many collections were omitted when looking for Presbyterian church records. You could easily see there were omissions in Colonial Virginia times when the search location of United States was used instead of British Colonial Virginia.
- For searching using full text search, it will also omit collections which fully have a date range not included, so you must either leave out the location from the search criteria and rely on filtering along (which should work) or do 2 different searches.
I am not an expert on South Carolina, so someone else will have to respond to that one.
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Sorry, I didn't explain better about the Brunswick part. It wasn't a search; it was the location choice popup associated with editing birthplace on a profile. What you say do is what I wanted to do but the British Colonial America choice wasn't there. But it's there this morning!
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FYI if a place is missing from standardization you can input suggestions to have them added here
https://www.familysearch.org/en/research/places/0