North Carolina Genealogy Forum  |  North Carolina Genealogy Newsletter






Forum Cesspool Cleaned Out

January 11th, 2013

For those of you that have visited in the last year I apologize. The forum had for some time become a target of spammers – most of the ip addresses were chinese and there were all sorts of posts for handbags and movie downloads and who knows what all junk. There were as of late 4000+ posts a day. I have disabled new registrations on the forum and disabled new posts outright. I’m sorry, but with the forum software there is no good way to manage it. At one point I had a weekly task of cleaning out a few dozen junk posts, but this was ridiculous. Yes, I could upgrade the forum, but migrating posts will take time, effort and quite frankly may not be easily possible without manually copying and pasting the remaining posts. Even then I suspect forum spammers will be a problem to deal with. I haven’t yet seen a bullet proof solution. I’ve pruned down to about 400 posts there. I may have thrown out someones legitimate query and if I did, I am sorry. But, there were 400,000 posts to sort through to save those 400 and if 1 or 2 good gems were lost in the sewage that had been dumped there, well – so be it.

In the future I may reopen a new forum, but may have to rethink the way registrations and posts are handled. Right now I don’t have the time to do so. It truly was at one point a nice growing resource and it’s very disappointing to see the way it was treated.

Guilford County Genealogical Society Meeting Nov. 19th

November 13th, 2011

Wanted to post this for any of you around the Guilford County area:

19 November 2011 – Larry Cates of the High Point Library Heritage Research Center will be our speaker. His subject will be “Last Wishes and Final Dispositions, Using Wills and Estate Records in Genealogical Research”.

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What do I do?

November 13th, 2011

I’m sure to some people it seems as though I rarely visit here to post. There are some that write in and seem to have the impression that there are many people that work on the site. I thought I’d take a moment to let you know it’s just one person. I try to keep up as best as I can, but I do have other ventures which keep me busy as well. I enjoy writing and working on this and my other genealogy sites, but as most of you, I have pay the bills. One such “pay the bills project” I’ve been working on lately is Asheville SEO Services and Web hosting in Asheville. I’ve actually done this for a number of years (15) somewhat quietly and have just designed a standalone site (away from my personal domain) to advertise and more correctly promote these services. Much of my computer service has evolved from onsite tech support into VPS Server and Linux server administration.

This means I get to do more work from home, or wherever I am. Unfortunately lately it hasn’t left me much time to tend my own sites as is often the case. (How many carpenters have I known that needed to take a few weeks to work on their OWN renovations?) In many cases it leaves me feeling as though the work never ends. (Truth be told when my health is well (long story in itself re: meniere’s disease and Rheumatoid Arthritis…) I am not uncommonly working from 9 or 10 in the morning to 3 AM.)

In any case, thanks for visiting my site!

Upcoming Genealogy and History Events in NC

October 15th, 2011

There are several events coming up related to history and genealogy in North Carolina that I wanted to make you aware of:

Finding Colonial Ancestors – 29 October 2011 Raleigh, NC at the North Carolina Museum of History, 5 East Edenton Street, Raleigh, NC 27601 – Presented by the North Carolina Genealogical Society to coincide with their annual meeting. The presenter is Barbara Vines Little. Price for members is $60, non-members $70. Visit ncgenealogy.org to register.

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Where is the 4th of July?

July 4th, 2011

Are we losing our national narrative? Today is the 4th of July, 2011. I wish all my readers a happy and contemplative Independence Day. Every year, I seem to spend quite a bit of time of reflection as we approach and reach the Fourth of July. I reflect on our struggle for Independence from the British. I reflect on the ideas and ideals of that struggle which spilled into the subsequent drafting of our constitution and I reflect on the principles that our nation was founded upon.

Today however, if I were a visitor from another world and looked at our cable television landscape. I would see a July 4th Gem extravaganza, news channels honed in on the Casey Anthony trial, somewhere there are sitcoms packaged into a Fourth of July luaghathon. Yesterday there were Star Wars movies in a “Force of July” marathon…. On most channels though it’s just a regular day with their usual, day to day scheduling. The history channel is the only place that I seem to find some acknowledgement that there is something special about this day (outside of a special opportunity to sell jewelry…) History International is where I find their great documentary series “The Revolution” running. I appreciate that, but must it only be on History INTERNATIONAL where we find some introspection on the significance of this day?

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Lunch and Learn Series – one in Asheville, another in New Bern

February 1st, 2011

I’ve been receiving updates from Spartanburgs History Hub about their events and republishing those on the South Carolina Genealogy site. Today I saw something catch my eye in the UNCA Alumni newsletter:

Lunch and Learn Series:

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New Alabama Genealogy Sister Site

July 27th, 2010

I hinted last week that there was another sister site on the way. Well, today the Alabama Genealogy site officially launched. You’ll notice that for now we have the same layout as here. As we have here, we have built pages for each county (67) in the state of Alabama with a profile and resources. Of course, there is more work to be done there, here and at the South Carolina Genealogy and Rhode Island Genealogy sites, but there are other sites on the way as well, although it may be a little while before the next official opening.

Exciting News…. We’re Growing!

July 16th, 2010

We’ve got some exciting news to share with you. Our network of sites is growing! You probably already know of our sister site at South Carolina Genealogy. Today we’d like to welcome Rhode Island Genealogy to the fold as well. In coming weeks we hope to be able to announce another addition to the family of sites! (To drop a hint…. the next one should be in the south.) So, we’re busy trying to get resources indexed and organized over at the Rhode Island site (and still working on updates here as well.) The county pages there are already useful enough to start sharing with the world though, so if you’re looking for any ancestors up in the Rhode Island area stop by! Thanks!

Massive County Page Update!

July 14th, 2010

After last weekends realization that there were many broken links on the county resources pages…. I went on quite a roll reinvigorating the county pages. I think all of them should have somegood content and a refreshing to make sure that all the links are current. (The new link checker script only tells me if there is an error pulling the page up, so…. if it’s the wrong address we don’t know unless it is checked…)

MANY MANY THANKS!!!! to those of you who have sent in corrections on links in the last couple of weeks. It was a tremendous help and helped me realize that I still had quite a bit of work to do with some of the county pages that were “unloved”. Every county now should have a brief sketch and LOTS of other information. As always, if you know of other resource that should be there, make use of the contact form and let me know! (Leave of the http::// in any addresses and I think that will get past the spam filtering in the form.

It’s true that we still have some counties that are a bit lean on details and we would love to incorporate YOUR input on those counties. Also, it looks like I’ve worked into a routine of formatting from Macon County on that I may need to go back over the first half of the alphabet and use the same formatting, but…. this is another significant improvement for our county pages.

Thanks for stopping by!

Broken Links, Fixing them and a Request for Help

July 5th, 2010

Update– July 5th–
As of right now all of the links on this site have been updated, and corrected (over 400 corrected). A handful of links 10 or so were removed outright because the information is no longer found or domain is gone/not responding for a couple days, etc.

The original post continues below….

As some of you may have noticed there are broken links on this site. It’s a simple fact of the way the internet is. Pages are always moving, changing their address, going away and new resources being added. I remember the very first building of this site entailed many days on end of my time collecting links and organizing them. Unfortunately I’m sure the minute I finished someone, somewhere decided to move their counties census archive to antoher server or something along those lines. The point is, the internet is in a state of flux and it takes more time than you would realize to keep up with it when there are so many resources we’re trying to cover. (We, actually translates to ME.) I’ve recently installed a link checker scripts that will mark through invalid links and notify me of broken links, which will help. I used to MANUALLY check the links from time to time. Now I’ve installed a plugin that will help identify broken links and have spent about 6 hours updating around 300 links. There are still quite a few to go and I will work on those over the next few days.

What I’m leading up to though is a request….. I GREATLY appreciate it if you know of the new location for a resource, county genweb site, or other link. I have had a few occasions where a site owner sends me an email updating their link information. Most of the time instead I find a broken link when a visitor sends me an email asking if I know where they’ve moved to. SO…. if you know of a moved resource I would greatly appreciate if you would make use of our contact form to let me know of it’s location. The only catch is that our current form is a bit picky and for spam prevention declines weblinks in this format http://www.weblinks.com – so substitute xx for the // and make links look more like http:xxwww.google.com if you would. (There may be a replacement contact form coming in the near future…) Thanks for your help!