North Carolina Genealogy

I want to announce a new article series that I’ll be starting this Tuesday. The series focuses on some of the (many) challenges that the digital age presents for genealogists. It is intended to flesh out and expand an article that I have pending for syndication online. I hope you enjoy the series and the other changes that are expected to be coming here to the site. Additional items in the article series will be posted weekly on Tuesdays. If you’re visiting here in the meantime, be sure to browse through the older articles, particularly the older genealogy columns or some of the other reference material onsite.

Thanks for visiting.

I’ve never been a big fan of “New Year’s Resolutions”. I guess the way I see it, if we want to change the way we do things, there’s no better time to start than right now and turn course and don’t look back. I don’t know, maybe the concept of the New Year’s Resolution seems to set us up for failure. Too many people give up once they’ve broken the resolution. They “fall of the wagon” so to speak and never climb back up on it. Well… I intend to get into a more regular schedule for posts on this site again. I know I’ve been sporadic in the past, sometimes posting a flurry of a half dozen articles at once and then nothing for months at a time. My intent is to get one article a week for the site. I’ll try to discipline myself somewhat after today so that I don’t dump several at once unless news warrants. I Can’t imagine what would be that newsworthy on a genealogy site that it couldn’t wait a week though…. after all we specialize in old news. 😉

Additionally,
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Just cleaning out some comment spam that’s accumulated for the last couple months. Sorry for the mess… if I’ve deleted legit comments, sorry too, but it just takes too much to try and doublecheck them all.

This might sound a bit off topic for North Carolina Genealogy, but sometimes we don’t realize how much the landscape has changed since our area here in Western North Carolina was colonized. At the time that the settlers came to this area there were LARGE areas of what were called canebrakes. Almost literally a forest of the sole bamboo native to this continent. The River Cane grew 20-30 feet and sometimes stretched on for miles. By some reports the French Broad River was bordered for many miles by a jungle of cane. Some of our place names still carry reference to the prevelance of this plant, Cane Creek is one example. These days there are few cane breaks, you might see a cluster of river cane here and there, it seems out of place to us now, but it was a sign of good farm land to our ancestors.

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The Cherokee ( Tsalagi is the word this is likely derived from) were the primary group of Native American’s living in the Western North Carolina, Upstate South Carolina, East Tennessee and North Georgia area at the time of European settlement in this area. Their influence extended well beyond that area though. The word Tsalagi is likely from the Creek language from what I’ve read, as the Cherokee word for themselves is aniyunwiya which means “The Real People” or “the original people”. Although over the years tsalagi has been used and accepted as well.

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OK, this may not be genealogy related but, I’m going to post it here. This afternoon I was looking into google’s page stats for someone else and happened to notice that THIS site is being indexed again by google. I thought I had noticed a bit of an uptick in traffic the last week or so. It was early December of 2005 I believe when the site mysteriously vanished from Google. I remember changing a few things that I thought might have been a problem and I emailed several times (with no real answer back.) Thanks google for taking me out of the proverbial corner. That’s not the only good thing going on though….

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Stories of Andersonville prison in the south have long been given full attention to the poor conditions in the Confederate run Civil War prison camp. The other morning, I happened upon a show on the History Channel entitled 80 acres of Hell (link is to a dvd) which documents a much lesser known story. That story is of Camp Douglas, a Union run prison camp at Chicago, Illinois. “80 acres of Hell” was one of the nicknames of this place which was detailed in the book “To Die in Chicago”.

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Thomas Elmore “Tom” Russell was b. Sept. 2, 1877 in Greenville, SC and d. March 29, 1938. He md. abt. 1899 to Roxie Peace. Roxie Peace was b. April 7, 1882 in Henderson Co., NC and d. January 18, 1938 in Saluda, Henderson Co., NC. They are both buried in Mountain Page Cemetery in Henderson County, NC.

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John Pleasant White was b. June 4, 1876 in NC (twin of Calvin White) and d. March 2, 1957 in Buncombe Co., NC. He md. Lillie Louetta Calloway Feb. 6, 1897 in Buncombe County, NC. Lillie Louetta Calloway was b. July 1, 1879 in NC and d. Sept. 10, 1958 in Buncombe Co., NC. They are both buried in West Memorial Park in Weaverville, Buncombe Co., NC.

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David Blankenship was b. July 4, 1833 in Rutherford Co., NC and d. November 5, 1912 in Madison Co., NC. He md. Dicey E. Moore Sept. 3, 1856 in Washington Co., TN. Dicey was b. July 7, 1838 in Flag Pond, TN and d. March 28, 1884 in Madison Co., NC. David was in the 64th NC Infantry Co., D in the Civil War, but MAY have also been in a Union outfit afterwords. (Family stories placed him in the Union army, there IS a David Blankenship that shows up in one of the NC UNION regiments AFTER his desertion from the 64th…

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