South Carolina Genealogy

Here’s another note that I’ve received in the last month and wanted to share with you:

New 317 page book on the Brice Family of Fairfield County, SC who came over
from Ireland ca 1785 and related families: Boyce, Brice, Caldwell, Clowney,
Douglass, Gaston, Simonton, Strong, etc. Genealogy goes back to Robert the
Bruce 1065 in Scotland. Many pictures in color with history of Brice’s
Crossroads Civil War Battle.

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Most people still think of cameras just in the context of taking pictures of people to label and document the family history. But with the flexibility of digital cameras (and the ability to cram hundreds if not thousands of shots on a digital memory card), it’s a shame that many people overlook digital cameras (and camcorders) as a great means for documenting other interesting things about the family history. One example is this…

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Family History, Genealogy, Ancestry… all of these terms usually bring to mind older retirees studiously working their way through library books. At least that’s the way it seemed back when I started around 1990. I was (at 18) the youngest person in the local Genealogy Society, usually the youngest in the libraries genealogy and history area. I think things have changed somewhat since then though that many younger people are getting into the hobby in the last 15 years or so. But, maybe a part of it is that we just don’t have the time to devote until we’re a little older and feel a need to have something else to pass on to our children and grandchildren. But how do you start out if you have absolute NO information but your name?

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I remember when I first started working on our family history, my trips to the library we’re exciting. I never knew what I was looking for and never knew what I would find. I went in with my notebook and a print or sketch of what we knew for as many generations as possible. Of course, I’d have names, birth and death dates going back to my 2nd great grandparents across the line, but I had no plan for research. I liked to think of this as the shotgun approach. I’d go and see what resources were available. If there was a census in a year that looked “target rich” then I’d pick it off the shelf and try to look for each family in the list.
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