South Carolina Genealogy

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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File this into the site update category. I’ve officially announced the opening of the new directory and forum, links can be found in the sidebar to the left. (Yes, I’ve flipped the navigation from the right side of the page to the left.) In addition, we have a new newsletter in the sidebar column. I expect it will be low volume. You might be interested in the Latest News page as well, which should present some of the latest genealogy related news from around the web. I’ve been working on revision and expansion of the county pages as well so you should be finding a bit more detail on those pages too. (County Pages are accessible via the menu on the left – South Carolina Counties.) The official announcement press release on some of the above expansions will appear in this space a week from tomorrow. Tomorrow you should get a new genealogy column in this spot.

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The Kershaw-Cornwallis House was originally built in 1777 by an early settler of Camden. (Camden, in fact, is the oldest inland town in South Carolina.) Joseph Kershaw had established a store in Camden for a Charleston mercantile company and did quite well. In fact, Camden had become an inland trade hub of sorts by 1768. The House was confiscated or seized by the British in 1780 when Lord Cornwallis setup a headquarters in the house. The British occupied it until 1781. Joseph Kershaw lived there until his death in 1791. The family sold the house by 1805 and it served as home for the Camden Orphan Society until 1822. In the Civil War, Camden House was a confederate storehouse and was destroyed in 1865. The house was rebuilt in 1877 at the Camden Revolutionary War Site.

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We’ve had a server upgrade today, then a server move and in a few hours we’re getting a software update, so we’ve had some rough sailing today. Hopefully this will be the biggest disruption for a while. Thanks for your patience.
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Update. If you been around in the last couple hours you’ve probably seen all sorts of half page displays, gizmos popping up here and there, but I think I’m done tweaking for the moment. I’ll need to browse in a few different browsers to make sure things still look good. Anyway, here’s the technical summary. We had an infrastructure update earlier today at my webhosting provider. After spending two hours getting domains working again, after that I thought I may as well proceed with my server migration. (This site has for a long time shared the same server with several of my other sites.) So, that didn’t go so well. But I finally got that settled and proceeded with the wordpress upgrade. So, that’s where we are. I am just noticing that there could be some category losses here. I’ll have to look into it and see if it’s complete posts that were lost or just the categories they were tagged with. On content article is still expected for in the morning and I expect MOST of the disruptions are done. Thanks.

It’s been a while since I’ve made some posts here, but as I’ve mentioned on my North Carolina Genealogy site, I am recommitting to a routine posting for my sites. My goal here is one post a week. I have an article series starting Tuesday (January 22nd, 2008) on the North Carolina Genealogy site that would be of general interest to any visitors here as well. The series is covering some of the many problems that we genealogists in the digital age face. On this site however, I plan to post on Wednesday’s. I don’t have a general topic of articles for here yet, but I may at one point run a similar series here. For the time being my post plans here are directly related to South Carolina Genealogy and History. In the meantime, welcome and have a look around. There are a few other notes to make.

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