South Carolina Genealogy

Check out the Hub City Railroad Museum’s NEW web site. It looks great and has tons of great information and photos! www.hubcityrailroadmuseum.org

Don’t forget to swing by the Magnolia Street Depot to see the museum in person, too! It’s open 10:00-2:00 on Wednesdays and 8:00-2:00 on Saturdays.

If you’re passionate about trains and their associated industries, they can always use volunteers!

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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There is a great exploration of Spartanburg, SC in the Washington Post. They look at the history of the area, up to the present and explore reasons for visiting the area. Nice highlight for Spartanburg!

I received the following invitation to the first meeting of the Spartanburg History Hub which will be Thursday January 28th at 7:00 pm in the Barrett Room of the Spartanburg Public Library’s Headquarters on Church Street in Spartanburg. I am unable to attend, but I asked if it would be okay to post it here and am doing so now. It sounds like a great idea and looks like a new and good way to connect the various groups that are working to preserve and share the History of Spartanburg County. If you are involved in that area and available, it looks like it would be well worth stopping in! Read on for the invitation…

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Georgetown County, SC has a great online initiative in their Georgetown Digital Library. Currently they have just a few collections for searching or browsing. These collections though represent a treasure trove of materials. Two of the collections (Morgan and Trenholm AND the Baruch Collection) are mostly historical photos from donated collections. However there is a collection of scans of Indentures. Unfortunately the ones I browsed through are just scans and not transcribed, but… they are searchable by the abstract of who is involved in the contract.

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On June 14, 2008 the Oconee Heritage Center will be staging the Newry Folk Festival in Newry, SC. (West of Greenville, SC near Lake Keowee.) There will be crafts and music throughout the day as well as a fiddle, banjo and guitar competition at the old mill store. The date of the festival marks the 114th anniversary of the first time one of the wheels was turned by water at this water powered mill. Newry sprung up as a textile town around the first mill there which was founded by William Ashmead Courtenay in 1893. Courtenay had located his mill along the Little River and named the location Newry after the Irish place that his ancestors had come from.

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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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From goupstate.com, this coming Thursday (October 12)…

2 p.m. “Learn About Your Family Tree Under the Trees — A Genealogy Presentation.” Winnie Walsh of the Spartanburg County Public Libraries will give a one-hour presentation on genealogy and the many sources stored in the Library’s Kennedy Room of Local History and the Cleveland Genealogical Collection. We will meet on the Observation Deck at Hatcher Garden. To register, call the Kennedy Room at 596-3508.

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Also from The State (Columbia, SC) comes this….

REVOLUTIONARY WAR LECTURE: 7 p.m., Friday, Christine Swager, “The Valiant Died: The Battle of Eutaw Springs.” Church of the Epiphany Ministry Center, Corner of S.C. Route 6 and 45, Eutawville. (803) 854-3629, (803) 492-7644.

REVOLUTIONARY WAR ENCAMPMENT: 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Saturday, Sunday. War re-enactments, 4:30 p.m. Saturday; 1:30 p.m. Sunday. Bring lawn chairs, blankets, picnics, water. $5 Parking. Torrington St., Eutawville. (803) 854-3629, (803) 492-7644.

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From The State (Columbia, SC)…

BEGINNING GENEALOGY: 7 p.m. Thursday. Explore family history. Free, Irmo Branch of Lexington County Public Library System, 6251 St. Andrews Rd., (803) 798-7880, ext. 2.

GERMAN CULTURE GENEALOGY: 10 a.m.-12 p.m. Sept. 9. Workshop about German culture in South Carolina. $15, members, $25 public. Lunch provided. State Archives and History Center, 8301 Parklane Road. To register, (803) 896-5729.