South Carolina Genealogy

This week, I’m highlighting my Abbeville County, SC Genealogy Resource page. Abbeville County was created in 1785 from the old Ninety-Six district and has been known as the birthplace and deathbed of the Confederacy. John C. Calhoun was a native of Abbeville County, South Carolina. The name Abbeville comes from a place name in France. Many of the early settlers of Abbeville County were French Huguenots. Erskine College is located in Abbeville County.

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You have probably noticed the many google rss feeds that I use on this site. It’s really easy to let google do a lot of your “news reading” for you these days and you don’t have to have anything fancier than an email address and a web browser to set things up. First off, visit news.google.com and type in a search that you want to keep informed about. (South Carolina Genealogy for instance). Then when the result comes up…

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This is a bit more of a housekeeping post of sorts. I wanted to let you know of a series that I’m going to start next week. I wanted to highlight each county of the state in article form. I do have the article profiles already, but I thought each one deserved the visibility of a regular post. This doesn’t mean that the next 46 weeks are going to be straight through county page summaries. I do intend to break up the series somewhat with the other content. As always, article submissions are welcome, so if you would like to post something on YOUR family history or an area of South Carolina you’ve researched Contact us directly, or consider submitting your article to the South Carolina Genealogy Directory.

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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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One of the notable places in South Carolina worth visiting is The Abbeville Opera House. It is approaching 100 years old. It seems strange to think of, but Abbeville was a stopover between Atlanta and Richmond for many of the New York based companies that took their shows “on the road”. Community members decided that if there were a facility in Abbeville that could stage productions, then they could sponsor showings.

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On the North Carolina Genealogy site I’ve done a writeup about interviewing your relatives. I’d like to work into a slightly different angle here. So many of our older relatives have wonderful old snapshots of family, family Bibles with handwritten information, yet copying it down to paper in our own hand seems a disservice. This doesn’t even consider the family letters or other papers which might have been saved in clipping boxes along with old obituary notices, or marriage notices from newspapers. That’s one thing about the electronic age that’s so good, it’s easy to scan such things. But would your relatives let you borrow their clipping boxes, photos and or family Bibles? They don’t really have to.

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The Times and Democrat of Orangeburg, SC had a great story this past month of an exhibit at the South Carolina State Museum. The exhibit is called “Finding Priscilla’s Children” and focuses on the life of a slave child named Priscilla that was taken from Sierra Leone and at the age of 10 years old in 1756, sold at auction to Elias Ball, a South Carolina rice planter.

She died at 65 and was survived by 10 children….

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Sometimes it’s easy to become spoiled. In researching my (white) ancestors, it is easily forgotten how much more challenging genealogy research might be if my ancestors were from Africa and not Europe. Of course, race divided our country very early on and in some ways it’s as clear in visiting Charleston’s old Slave Market as anywhere in the country. That much said, African American ancestry research can be very rewarding. Here’s a great example…

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Yes, why am I posting these here? Well, you see over the last few weeks I’ve been working quite a bit to promote the site and get the word out about some of the good things going on here at the South Carolina Genealogy site and I wanted to go ahead and archive some of the press releases here. I’ve got one more to go, but that may not come for a day or two. Regular schedule of postings will pick up tomorrow.

SouthCarolinaGenealogy.org today announced the completion of County detail pages providing a thumbnail sketch of information on each county as well as useful links for genealogists. There are pages for each county in the state and the amount of information available varies by county.

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