North Carolina Genealogy

Call me sentimental…. I’ve copied the old site’s What’s New items (going back to 1997) into this article….

Update April 17, 2000

As you might notice the site has moved – over the past months there have been numerous problems – the forum and query posts not working. I’ve been aware of – but unable to fix as I was unable to login to make any changes at all to the site. – Finally, arrowweb has appearantly deleted my site now as it’s MIA on there server. Hopefully I can overhaul the pages now that I can actually access them again. Let me point out that this page is low on the list of my priorities. If you go to www.averyjparker.com you will see I’m doing webhosting for others which of course takes priority, as well as my computer service and teaching of piano lessons, etc. So this site is way down on the list as far as updating. My main goal with it is to have a resource for posting queries specific to NC – and a forum as well as some more specific links and tools to help you out. I neither have the time or resources to make it the kind of site that some people have complained to me it should be. I’ve never intended to “post all of my information” on the website. There are several reasons for this. 1) There are areas of my own research that I have serious doubts about. The problem is that anything when it goes into print becomes assumed to be true. I don’t want to spread possible misinformation. 2) I’ve been burned before – even giving out accurate information and having others transcribe it incorrectly, then attribute it to me. (And not about someone 200 years ago – it seems as though I had an extra brother, missing uncle and a few other things were “really” messed up.) I’m sorry for the tone of this but I’ve had some blistering emails from some that seem to think that I should be some sort of familysearch.com site. Of course I’ve also had many very nice emails and I appreciate them all. I’m sorry I don’t have time to answer each one. I sometimes think I could spend all day each day answering mail. Thank you and I hope that the site will serve your purposes. I’m sure that there are many broken links and I will be trying to correct that – so please do keep letting me know of links to other genealogy sites related to NC. – particularly county sites.

Thanks very much,

Avery J. Parker

Update October 14, 1998

As of 9:30 PM EDT we are back up and running. I apologize for taking so long to restore the pages, but the “hack attack” sapped my enthusiasm. I will do my best to get things in working order – most of the pages are up now, but the scripts may not all be configured properly – so it may take me a while to track down the bugs. I apologize to all of you who lost query or forum posts due to the deletion of my site, Arrowweb appearantly does not keep backups of the smaller sites for more than 2 days, and even with a 33.6 modem it’s now taken me about 3 hours + to upload the most recent backup I had available. I also plan on enhancing these pages in the near future. I’m not quite sure how as of yet, but I hope to catch up with the cutting edge of web technology. Thank you for your continued support.

Update August 29, 1997 (2nd today)

As of 12:31 PM EDT the frame chat room is set up. Currently there is only one room available for North Carolina Genealogy Chat, but if there is a future need for more space, that can be easily arranged, just let me know. Now, just use the forum to make an appointment with your genealogy friends and come talk about your research in the chat room.

Update August 29, 1997

As of this morning the forum posts prior to August 10th 1997 are available for searching through this search form. The link has been announced in the Forum and there will be a link there to go to it from there. As I mention in the announcement there, the best way to list ALL archived forum posts is to search under FAQ as this term appears on each page. I hope that this helps those of you that are looking for that post you saw a couple months back. Also, starting next week I will be thinning out the query posts. Any posts dated prior to August 1st will be archived and I will be providing a link to that archive as well. I plan to make it available as one big file, but may break it down by month for ease of online browsing.

For those of you that have requested information from me in the posting of a query and have not recieved anything back yet, as before, I am still backlogged with mail. Most of this is from query posts, and rather than sort through each one, I would ask that any that are interested in information on my services use the information request form instead. I will answer all information requests, it is just taking up quite a bit of time. My new research area is in Western North Carolina. I don’t have the list of counties that I am available to research in drawn up yet. I will make a note of it here when I do publish that list.

One note on the frame chat –. I am switching to a new chat program and plan on installing it this afternoon. I am somewhat mystified at the failure of the current script as it operated well for some time, the Unix script permissions and directory permissions are set correctly and it should work, but for some reason has ceased to work. I have another script though, which I’ve implemented on my other 2 sites that I will be using with the Genealogy chat. I’ll post an announcement here once that is up. Thank you very much for visiting my pages.

Update August 12, 1997

As you may have noticed, there is a new bookstore on this site, it is in association with Amazon.com. Currently there are about 50 titles listed, but I do hope to add more, if there are any suggestions for relevant titles to offer, please e-mail me. Also, in an effort to make sure that as many people as possible are aware of the great genealogy resources available through Amazon.com, I will be inserting links to descriptions of many of these books where appropriate throughout these pages. These will all be prefaced by this logo . I thank you very much for visiting my web pages and hope you enjoy the titles that I’ve selected for you.

Update August 11, 1997

The forum has reopened for postings, I apologize for the loss of the posts that were on the board previously, they may be made available for download as a compressed file at a later date though. Also, the page “Queries:Surnames starting with the letter ‘S'” has been restored, the error, however, did erase the queries that had occupied the page. I haven’t yet started pruning out the older queries, but will shortly, now that everything is in working order.

Thank you for your patience and let me know if you encounter any further problems.

Update August 9, 1997

First let me pass on a note about the North Carolina Genealogy Forum, right now it is not working and has been that way for some time. All of the posts that it carried were basically lost. I suspect that this may have been a little bit of vandalism, as I had no problems with my with scripts for the forum under rather heavy usage for some time, and earlier an error with my ads occured shortly after a difference of opinion with someone over the way advertising should be sold. In any case, it may take me a couple of daysto get the forum up and running, but it will be back.

As many of you may know I have not been updating these pages lately. In late spring, we got busy preparing to move and then finally moving among other distractions and so I am a good ways behind in responding to e-mail and in maintaining these pages. Right now I have over 600 messages in my inbox and it is mushrooming every day. At this point I do plan on answering all of those of you who have requested information, but it will be a while before I can get to all of you. Also, I know many of you havebeen reporting some bugs with the scripts that run these pages. I have altered existing scripts to get them to work with the concept of these pages, so there are some bugs. However, when the script works for the majority of users it’s very difficult to see whatmight be going wrong, so please be patient with these minor problems.

I have also told some of you that there are some changes coming to these pages. There should be nothing drastic, but I do hope to add a bookstore in coming weeks to highlight some genealogy and history related books for you. Also, I will be going through and cleaning up the query pages somewhat. I know there are a lot of duplicate queries and a lot stretching back several months. In order to help speed the loading of pages and make room for new queries, I will be retiring some of the older queries. I think that I maymake these older queries available in one or more compressed file formats, but it may take me a good while to get that together and available for download.

I will post an update to these pages letting you all know when the changes are complete.

Once again, I will take this opportunity to thank you for visiting my pages and I also thank you for your patience as these pages undertake a little bit of remodeling.

Update March 26, 1997

I’ve now posted a North Carolina/Genealogy/History Trivia quiz for your entertainment. It’s a short (10 question), multiple choice quiz and I hope to put up a new one each month. To take the quiz click here.

Update March 25, 1997

A new column has just been uploaded. The topic this time is researching at the State Archives, while this focuses on the North Carolina Archives, it might be useful to those of you researching elsewhere as well. You can access this from the Family History Columns page.

I few weeks ago, I added a Java based chatroom to the NC Genealogy Forum page. Now, in an effort to allow more people to access a chat room, I’ve added two rooms that do not require java. They are both accessable from the NC Genealogy Forum. One is devoted to North Carolina Genealogy, and the other to Genealogy on the WWW. These new rooms are much faster than the java script and should be compatible with just about any browser. I’ve called them frames based chat from the Genealogy Forum menu, but frames can be disabled. To take a look at them, visit the North Carolina Genealogy Forum.

Update March 20, 1997

I’ve spent a lot of time on getting other genealogy sites to link to these pages the last week and haven’t spent a lot of time working on the content here. I hope to spend a little more time on the content next week as I plan on posting a new column by the end of the next week (probably around Thursday the 28th.

Also, you’ll notice a new feature on the homepage, a link to enter the “Wormhole”. This is a concept similar to webrings and the rail, only each time you click you are sent to a random site (as oppossed to sites ordered in a progression such as a webring). This should be a fun addition for those of you wanting to visit points onward in the web.

I’d also like to remind you of the growing list of genealogy links on the Add a Link Page. On this page is not only information about how to add a link to my pages on yours, but a place for other webmasters or even the average web citizen to add a site of their choosing. This list is automatically updated. As of my last check, there are 20 sites that have been added there. To visit it directly click here.

This has been a busy couple of weeks as the average hits per day here have gone from around 20 to over 100 since Friday, March 14. I appreciate all who have visited and if you have any comments for improvement, please e-mail me. In addition to that, if you run a site on the web, I would appreciate a link from your site. The information is on my Add a Link page.

Finally, if any of the links in the North Carolina Genealogical Societies and Resources section (or any section of these pages) are out of date, or do not work, please let me know. Along the lines of that thought, if there are any new sites out there that should be included in these pages, please submit them to me here.

Special Announcement March 7, 1997

The problem with the automated query posts has been fixed as of 3:59PM EST on Friday March 7, 1997. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.

As of today there’s a new column posted on the columns page. Also, I discovered in the course of posting it that the old columns were unaccessable. My apologies for that, the problem has now been corrected. If you run into any problems with the files at this site, please let me know. Also, since the beginning of this week there has been a slight change to the query posting process. It is now automated. This means that once you fill out the query post form, it should automatically be posted to the correct page and you and I will both receive e-mail confirming that. This will get your posts online a little faster and save some legwork for me. If you have any problems posting, please let me know and I will post your query for you. Also, please include information on the problem that you encountered.

There’s another new feature debuting this week in the North Carolina Genealogy Forum. That is our own Chat Room. This is a java run chat and so it will load and run right in your browser. There is a catch though, you need to have either Microsoft Internet Explorer version 3.01, or Netscape Navigator version 2.0 or 3.0 for this to work. I know this may limit the numbers accessing it for now, but this chat service offered more flexibility than the others that I looked at.

Also you will notice a icon on several of these pages. I’m using this to tell you that something on the page behind the link has changed. I’ll leave the ‘new’ icon in place by any category for about a week before removing it (if nothing else has changed within a week). I’m really pleased with the query posts starting to come in and there seems to be increasing traffic almost daily. I would like to make this site the best place to look for information on North Carolina Genealogy and the first place to go to share information with others on North Carolina Genealogy. If you have any ideas on how I can better do that, please e-mail me.

Week of March 3, 1997

Last week saw the move of these pages and in all of the activity, I failed to post a new column. I will have one posted this week and you will notice many other new features. The new home of these pages supports some fancier uses of the web and among the changes, you’ll find a North Carolina Genealogy Forum, your posts are added “instantly” (remember to refresh or reload the page from your browser), also on the add a link, you can instantly add genealogy, history and North Carolina links to that page. Again, this is “instantly” added, all you need to do is refresh or reload the page to see your link added. Also new this week is a search engine. As this site has grown, I’ve become aware that it might be difficult to find exactly what you’re looking for, I hope that the site search will help. Finally, I hope to be adding a little novelty item to the pages this week, a random geneaogy/history/North Carolina web link. This is generated from the database of links added to the Add a Link Page and I hope to expand on it to include the 100+ links that I’ve already included on these pages, but this will take some time. The random link should be up and working by midweek, but there may not be many sites to choose from initially. I hope that these changes help to make my pages a little more useful to all the genealogists out there. You might have noticed a new feature on the homepage, The Rail is a concept similar to WebRings, but with a railroad analogy. Currently, the homepage is linked to the family special, linking sites related to families and genealogy (no pun intended.) My neighbors are randomly chosen from one day to the next, so this page has new neighbors every day. As always these pages growth will be helped greatly by your input, thank you for your help in the growth of these pages.

If you have any suggestions please e-mail me. Thanks for your help in the growth of these pages.

Special Announcement February 28, 1997

These pages have moved. The new address to find my pages is “http://ajpgenealogy.home.ml.org/homepage.htm”. The new server is case sensitive when it calls file names, I’ve sorted through most of them, but if you run accross any “file not found” messages, please let me know, odds are it is looking for something in capital letters that on the disk is in lower case. I appreciate your patience as I sort out the transfer to our new home.

Week of February 24, 1997

You’ll notice the addition of several web rings here. The concept behind these is that you can bypass the search engines and look through pages of related subjects, please take a look at them. Once again, this week look for more historical references to be showing up, and a little more detail on those already posted. That was a goal for last week that was pushed to the sidelines. Also, look for yet another new column this week. In the next week or two, I expect to add a few more blank forms to aid in your genealogical research. I hope they will be of use to you. These pages growth will be helped greatly by your input, thank you for your help in the growth of these pages.