South Carolina Genealogy

I know, this may not be of interest to a lot of the South Carolina Genealogy researchers out there, but for those of you researching families in the Northeast as well. We’ve just launched our Rhode Island Genealogy site as a sister to this and the North Carolina Genealogy sites. This doesn’t mean that this site will be neglected, we just wanted to branch out and start covering a wider area. Speaking of which, we hope to have another site announcement coming in the next few weeks. It will be in the south – see keep an eye out for the announcement! Thanks!

(I guess this will be a study in extremely long post titles (?))

Recently I’ve been looking at many companies that provide voice broadcast services. This is where you record an audio message and then can have it sent to many phone numbers. Political Campaigns and other organizations use this for get out the vote efforts and the like and I’ve had some business uses which is why I was researching these voice broadcast services. As I’ve been researching it though I’ve been thinking of the many different kinds of uses that this technology has. Some people call it a voice broadcast, others say voice blast, I’ve heard it called robocalls… I guess it is essentially like sending an email to everyone on your contact list, only it’s a voice mail message. It’s interesting that they’re so easy to do these days and I was thinking about how the family genealogist might make use of them. Family reunion season I guess probably peaks in the summer, so you may have to save this idea for next year, but how about making the calls to let your family know about the next get together, or make updates to the scheduling?

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The newest version of Picasa has been released (version 3.0) Google’s photo organizing software will scan your hard drive for pictures. The new version offers more powerful editing features than previous versions. The main buzz around this version though is it’s promise of facial recognition. In order to use this (from what I’ve seen so far) you need to upload the photos to Picasa Web Albums. Once there you can label the faces that are found in pictures.

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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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There’s a new site that’s dedicated to the genealogy of African Americans of the Lowcountry. The site is sponsored by the Magnolia Plantation Foundation of Charleston, SC and will be publishing records online of the African American slaves of plantations from the traditional rice growing areas of the low country of South Carolina, Georgia and even Northern Florida. (Covering the area of Gullah/Geechee culture.) The site is called LowCountry Africana. They have ambitious goals it appears, their first project will be putting online reconstructed family histories of the slaves of the Drayton family plantations.

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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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This is just an “in between” regular articles update. As some of you have noticed I’ve been going through the county pages, adding more information there. As you can imagine the process takes a little bit of time. I’ve managed to get to a couple county pages per day. I’m currently about halfway through. I’m not moving in any particular order, other than the counties that seem to be more popular (visited more often) get higher priority.

Additionally, if you are aware of other links for a county and would like to submit those, or an article for the site, you are more than welcome to do so through the Contact Us Page.

There are now forums for so you can post a query either statewide, or for each county at the South Carolina Genealogy Forums and those links are starting to be added to the respective county pages.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to say that if you have a genealogy related web site I would be greatly honored if you would link to our site, the code to do so is <a href=”http://www.southcarolinagenealogy.org/”>South Carolina Genealogy</a> – you can simply copy and past into your site! Thanks very much in advance and if you do so, you might want a link back to your site, get a free listing in our South Carolina Genealogy Directory.

Thanks for your help and support.

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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