South Carolina Genealogy

This is the first in a series of posts listing popular baby names. I’m alternating posts between here and my North Carolina Genealogy site. I intend to mostly cover census years, but I wanted to start with a more current list for a baseline.

2007 – popular baby names:

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So, if you’re not already thinking about Christmas gifts for your family, you probably will be soon. So, how can you work your genealogy research into gifts for the family? Let’s face it you spend many, many hours each year with your research, maybe there’s a good way you can package and give some of that to other members of your family. After all, I suspect they’re part of the reason you’re spending all this time researching, so you can tell them about their ancestors. Well, here’s an idea… cafepress.com let’s you put pictures on all sorts of products, coffee mugs, shirts, etc. One good idea might be a family picture from many years ago on a coffee cup… but there might be some better gift ideas if you dig through their site. In order to do that, you will need to sign up for an account, upload your photo(s) and choose the products you want to place it on.

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As you may have noticed I’m adding RSS feeds for the county Forums to each County page as posts accumulate there.

So, I’ve added the feed today to the Spartanburg County Genealogy page. There now should be forum feeds on 25 pages including a feed for the statewide forum and an aggregate feed for the entire forum. So…. that means we’ve now got 23 o the counties setup with a forum feed on the page which marks the halfway point!

Update 11/11–
Greenville County Genealogy now has the forum feed (and apparently I had left out forum links there originally – that’s now corrected.

You might be interested in this history of United States Presidential Elections posted at my North Carolina Genealogy site yesterday.

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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There are few personalities of the American Revolution that have endured in story quite like that of Francis Marion – the swamps of South Carolina are what lead to his nickname the Swamp Fox and many places in South Carolina bear his name even today. A recent news article reminded me yet again of this figure. An interpreter of Francis Marion was to speak at a North Carolina Museum.

In any case… I’ve profiled him once before, but this is decidedly more in depth…

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Sciway.net is an amazing online resource. I just found some fascinating links and references there related to South Carolina’s African American History. Among the highlights of the page (for myself at least…) A large pdf file listing African American historical sites in South Carolina. A list of distinguished SC African Americans. Festival and Event listing, a Gullah heritage and language page.

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Just a housekeeping note to mention that I’ve made slight updates to the Oconee and Saluda County pages. Also, I’m going to start putting rss feeds from the respective forums into the county profile pages. So, the Union County page would have an rss feed with the latest posts from the Union county forum. I hope to do the same wiht all the pages evenutally, but currently I’ll just be highlighting the counties that already have forum posts. That should help give the posts a bit more visibility.

Counties that now have the rss feed – Aiken, Barnwell, Berkeley, Chester, Chesterfield, Clarendon, Darlington, Edgefield, Fairfield, Georgetown, Hampton, Kershaw, Laurens, Lee, Marlboro, Orangeburg, Sumter, Union, York and I’ve added the St. Andrews forum to the Charleston County Page.

–update 10/10 —
Also Dillon County has the feed from the Forums. (Also added forum feed and edits for Richland. Edits on Williamsburg County.)

I thought with the recent arson of the Lancaster County Courthouse, I might take this opportunity to post a summary of my page on Lancaster County, South Carolina and the genealogy resources that we link to.

Lancaster County was formed in 1798 from the old Camden District. Many of the early settlers here were from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. That area was named for the region in England of the same name. This was the same Lancaster with the symbol of the red rose that had opposed the House of York in England in the War of the Roses. Read the rest of this entry »

I know there was a bit of a gap in posts there, but I’m back into a bit of a routine with getting posts out on the sites. hopefully I’ll get a good schedule going again. I have had to attend to some other business matters over the summer and that has left little time to even think about the state of these sites. I’m glad to tell you that the newsletter will see a new edition soon. I’m amazed at the kind of response in signups there have been even in my absence! Also, let me remind you of the (growing) forums.

I also have had a number of personal genealogy requests in the last month (my own and my wifes families)…. I’ll be trying to respond to those in the coming months. Things are still busy, but the pace has hopefully slowed enough that I can get back on the posting horse….