North Carolina Genealogy

This is an idea I’ve thought about for quite some time. Our children are a bit young yet to really get interested in the family history (or any history for that matter.) But, it’s a dilemma that some people face even with older children. How can they pass along the information, or [...]

The month of April has me thinking about taxes. It was the topic for the just released South Carolina Genealogy newsletter and I thought I’d give some general information here as well. Of course, most of us think first of the Federal Income tax. This dates back to the Civil War, [...]

We’ve all seen great interviews, some people are just born questioners. They put their subject at ease, and make getting information look so easy. When you start out researching your family history, one of the first things you’ll need to do is to interview your family members to find out what they know [...]

How can you find an answer if you don’t know how to phrase the question? Isn’t it amazing that even today with all the worlds information increasingly online and at our literal fingertips…. that sometimes we have a hard time putting into words exactly what we’re looking for? But it’s true, searching for [...]

My recent posts on historical photos got me thinking about historical newspaper articles. Our Asheville Citizen-Times site offers articles older than 7 days for a fee online. Of course, that archive only goes back to 1999 online. This isn’t exactly what I was thinking of. I remember once upon a time [...]

Last time I talked about a new historic photos archive at the Asheville Citizen-Times. I think this is a great thing and would love to see more news organizations push ahead and release their older photo content for public browsing. But how is the average person to do that. We all have [...]

A long time ago my Mom came up with the term “cemunking” for the hobby of going out to canvas a cemetery and look for familiar names, and record information from the markers. It’s a hobby that’s not nearly as risky as spelunking (exploring caves), but it does have it’s risks. Poison Ivy, [...]

I think when I started researching online I must have gone through 500 pages of paper a month printing out leads from forums, printing out copies of census records, etc. etc. etc. It was quickly overwhelming and I think I still have portions of an unsorted stack of “leads” that are possibly related to [...]

Another challenge that the online world brings for genealogists is the issue of privacy. Family history researchers as a general rule are very open and willing to share lots of information. At least in the part of the country I live that’s how people are. I don’t know how many times [...]

What if, this moment, as your reading this sentence all of your genealogy data vanished? All your research notes, all the pictures you’ve diligently collected and scanned, all your ancestry and kinship reports? How much time and effort would you have to reconstruct? OK, I know some of you are backing up [...]