South Carolina Genealogy is getting a full rebuild. The original site served researchers for many years—county notes, resource links, articles, and community queries—but the underlying WordPress install, plugins, and theme stack had become fragile, slow, and hard to keep secure.

We are not throwing away that work. We are archiving and elevating it.

What is changing

• Modern platform — a custom PHP 8 application (no WordPress attack surface), cleaner URLs, and a proper admin area for ongoing updates.
• All 46 counties restructured — formation dates, parent districts, seats, neighbors, courthouse pointers, and modern research links (FamilySearch, SCDAH, county government, GenWeb).
• Historical depth — major stories get their own child pages (Fort Sumter, Kings Mountain, Cowpens, Catawba Nation, Gullah Geechee heritage, and more).
• Forum archive preserved — old bbPress queries remain readable as a research archive while we plan a safer path for future questions.
• Link cleanup — dead destinations replaced or pointed to archives; validators run with a real browser user-agent so “blocked bot” noise does not hide working links.

What we archived from the old site

• County genealogy narratives and resource lists from the original WordPress pages
• More than two hundred historical articles and event posts
• bbPress forum topics and posts (read-only heritage archive)
• Legacy files such as cemetery spreadsheets and early text resources
• The old public_html WordPress tree remains on the server as a backup until cutover is complete

The incomplete secondary wordpress/ tree that was never a working resurrection attempt is not part of the new site path.

What you can use today (preview)

The rebuild is staged while production still serves the classic site. When cutover happens, the same domains will point at the new app with redirects from old WordPress URLs wherever possible.

• Browse all counties
• Statewide resources
• Articles & news
• Forum archive

What is coming next

• Richer design, interactive county map, print-friendly research pages
• Scheduled publishing tools for news and research notes (live in admin now)
• More in-depth topic pages per county
• SEO redirects so bookmarked old links keep working

Thank you for researching with us—whether you last visited in 2008 or this morning. The Palmetto State’s family history deserves a home that is stable, readable, and built to grow.

— South Carolina Genealogy