South Carolina Genealogy

I can’t believe my last post here was January! I had tried to keep up with a post a week for my sites for quite a while and managed it, but frankly it’s just too fast a pace with work and everything (and about 10 sites!). So, I won’t be posting as frequently as that in the future. I hope to be putting out a post once a month, but to be honest, it could be every other month, or two or three in a day and then nothing for a month or two. I do try to keep updating the pages behind the scenes so hopefully our resources are getting a bit more complete as time goes by. Hopefully the less ambitious posting will mean that when I have time I will be able to put out better in depth posts and devote more time to the real heart of the site which is our county resource pages.

So, the last few weeks have been quite hectic. To start out with I had a project to work on a web site for a place that does self storage in Greenville, SC and that was closely followed by its sister site that also does self storage in Greenville, SC. I seem to recall several weekends that I worked through with one computer issue after another. including two hard drive replacements over one weekend… then after those projects we started passing a nasty bug around our family and as we recovered, then had to get everything together for our scheduled trip to the beach.

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You may have noticed that we had a 24-36 hour vanishing act. From the information I saw there was an emergency hardware replacement on our server that hosts southcarolinagenealogy.org I think this may have been the longest outage I’ve seen with our host. (Wouldn’t have enjoyed being in the server room for all of that…) Anyway, things seem to be back up and running at this point pretty well. Soon, I will be looking at a major wordpress upgrade here, but hopefully there won’t be much outward changing as I do that.

Thanks for stopping by and may you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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As you may have noticed I’m adding RSS feeds for the county Forums to each County page as posts accumulate there.

So, I’ve added the feed today to the Spartanburg County Genealogy page. There now should be forum feeds on 25 pages including a feed for the statewide forum and an aggregate feed for the entire forum. So…. that means we’ve now got 23 o the counties setup with a forum feed on the page which marks the halfway point!

Update 11/11–
Greenville County Genealogy now has the forum feed (and apparently I had left out forum links there originally – that’s now corrected.

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There are few personalities of the American Revolution that have endured in story quite like that of Francis Marion – the swamps of South Carolina are what lead to his nickname the Swamp Fox and many places in South Carolina bear his name even today. A recent news article reminded me yet again of this figure. An interpreter of Francis Marion was to speak at a North Carolina Museum.

In any case… I’ve profiled him once before, but this is decidedly more in depth…

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Just a housekeeping note to mention that I’ve made slight updates to the Oconee and Saluda County pages. Also, I’m going to start putting rss feeds from the respective forums into the county profile pages. So, the Union County page would have an rss feed with the latest posts from the Union county forum. I hope to do the same wiht all the pages evenutally, but currently I’ll just be highlighting the counties that already have forum posts. That should help give the posts a bit more visibility.

Counties that now have the rss feed – Aiken, Barnwell, Berkeley, Chester, Chesterfield, Clarendon, Darlington, Edgefield, Fairfield, Georgetown, Hampton, Kershaw, Laurens, Lee, Marlboro, Orangeburg, Sumter, Union, York and I’ve added the St. Andrews forum to the Charleston County Page.

–update 10/10 –
Also Dillon County has the feed from the Forums. (Also added forum feed and edits for Richland. Edits on Williamsburg County.)

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I know there was a bit of a gap in posts there, but I’m back into a bit of a routine with getting posts out on the sites. hopefully I’ll get a good schedule going again. I have had to attend to some other business matters over the summer and that has left little time to even think about the state of these sites. I’m glad to tell you that the newsletter will see a new edition soon. I’m amazed at the kind of response in signups there have been even in my absence! Also, let me remind you of the (growing) forums.

I also have had a number of personal genealogy requests in the last month (my own and my wifes families)…. I’ll be trying to respond to those in the coming months. Things are still busy, but the pace has hopefully slowed enough that I can get back on the posting horse….

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I know, buildings can be rebuilt, but there is something undeniably sad about such a beautiful structure being intentionally burned as the Lancaster County Courthouse. I hear there are charges in the case, it is arson. The good news is that no one was injured and it sounds as though no records were lost in the blaze, but still… it’s a sad sight. More at the mad genealogist. Maybe I’m sensitive to the issue particularly because where I live in Western North Carolina there are some courthouses that have been burned several times over the years. Many records in those counties are nonexistent until very recently due to the courthouse burnings. “It’s a burned records county” has become a term that ends many questions starting with a “have you looked for a ?”

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The County Page highlight Continues…. This week the Aiken County, SC Genealogy resource page. Aiken County was created in 1871 from Edgefield, Orangeburg, Barnwell and Lexington Counties. It was named for the president of the South Carolina railroad, William Aiken. The town of Aiken was established as a depot on the South Carolina rail line between Hamburg (on the Savannah River) and Charleston, this would become the county seat. In the 1870s the area became a resort for the well to do from the north. The Savannah River Site was established in Aiken County in 1950 as a nuclear bomb plant.

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This week, I’m highlighting my Abbeville County, SC Genealogy Resource page. Abbeville County was created in 1785 from the old Ninety-Six district and has been known as the birthplace and deathbed of the Confederacy. John C. Calhoun was a native of Abbeville County, South Carolina. The name Abbeville comes from a place name in France. Many of the early settlers of Abbeville County were French Huguenots. Erskine College is located in Abbeville County.

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This is a bit more of a housekeeping post of sorts. I wanted to let you know of a series that I’m going to start next week. I wanted to highlight each county of the state in article form. I do have the article profiles already, but I thought each one deserved the visibility of a regular post. This doesn’t mean that the next 46 weeks are going to be straight through county page summaries. I do intend to break up the series somewhat with the other content. As always, article submissions are welcome, so if you would like to post something on YOUR family history or an area of South Carolina you’ve researched Contact us directly, or consider submitting your article to the South Carolina Genealogy Directory.

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