New North Carolina Chapter of the Palatines To America
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Press Release – Palatines To America, German Genealogy Society Forms NC Chapter
RALEIGH, NC (September 22, 2011) – Would you like to learn more about your German ancestors? A group of people from all across the state have come together to form a North Carolina Chapter of the Palatines To America, German Genealogy Society. It is open to all who are of German descent or who have an interest in German genealogy and history.
The national Palatines To America organization was founded in 1975 in Columbus, Ohio and has seven state chapters and over 2,000 members. The national society publishes a quarterly journal, “The Palatine Immigrant”, which focuses on research and a quarterly newsletter, “The Palatine Patter”, which focuses on the activities of the national and state chapters.
North Carolina has two areas that had significant German immigration during the 18th century: New Bern was founded by German Palatine and Swiss settlers in 1710, and the piedmont which had several German groups including the German Reformed, Lutherans, Moravians, and others who settled during the mid 1700s.
In succeeding generations, many families of German descent traveled down one of three branches of the great wagon road from Pennsylvaniato North Carolina and settled in the piedmont as well as others who settled along the coast coming from the coastal northeast. In the 1920s, a group of descendants of the New Bern German Palatines formed The North Carolina Society of the Descendants of the Palatines. Their group was active until the 1950s. During the last century, there have been many people of German descent who have moved to all parts of the state.
The inaugural meeting of the North Carolina chapter will be Saturday, October 1, 2011 at the Wake County Southeast Regional Library, 908 Seventh Avenue, Garner, NC 27529. The meeting will be held in a seminar format from 10:15 am to 3:15 pm.
Three speakers will be featured: Mr. Jerry Miller, President of the Palatines To America NC Chapter who will make a presentation about the Palatines To America organization and conduct a short business meeting; Mr. Victor T. Jones, Jr., Special Collections Librarian at the New Bern-Craven County Public Library, Kellenberger Room, and President-Elect of the North Carolina Genealogical Society, will make a presentation about the “Early Settlers of New Bern”, and Mrs. Bonnie
Everhart, Past Chairman of the Palatines to America Immigrant Ancestor Register and former PalAm National Librarian and Historian, will make a presentation about “Researching the Holt Family Line Into North Carolina.”
There will also be a panel discussion about the resources available to Palatines To America members by Mrs. Everhart, Mr. Jones, and Mr. Miller. The Inaugural Meeting/Fall seminar is open to the public with a $10.00 registration fee. Registrations at the door are fine, please call or email to confirm your attendance.
For more information about the society, North Carolina charter membership, and to register for the Fall seminar, please visit www.PalAm.org, or email ncpalam@palam.org, or call 919.744.0219.
Contact:
Jerry Miller, President, Palatines To America, German Genealogy
Society, North Carolina Chapter
www.PalAm.org
919.744.0219 (President’s Direct Telephone)
NCPalAm@PalAm.org (President’s Email)
David French, NC Chapter Publicity Director (Media Contact)
919.480.2011 (Media Telephone)
PalatinesToAmericaNC@gmail.com (Media Email)
New County Coordinators
Here at the NCGenWeb Project we are pleased to announce new county coordinators (CC) for three of our counties! And, both are named Susan 
Union County – Susan Sullivan is our new CC for Union County. Susan has family roots in the area that go back many years and has been practicing genealogy for many years. Her family also is from nearby Chesterfield County South Carolina. Susan is a graphic designer by profession and we look forward to her plans for adding additional content.
Perquimans County & Pasquotank County – Susan C. Griffin is our new CC for Perquimans and Pasquotank counties. Susan G. also has strong family ties to both of these areas. A third-generation genealogist, Susan G. is well qualified to help make these county resources better for you.
Of course we also welcome contributions from our researchers, so if you have family from Union, Perquimans, Pasquotank or any NC county, please keep the NCGenWeb project in mind.
NCGenWeb Adopts NC Pages on FamilySearch Research Wiki
In the last post, we shared information about transfer of the FamilySearch website to their new online domain – www.familysearch.org and highlighted some of the new features. One such feature included their Research Wiki – a site designed to help guide you to resources for locality searching and also to provide information on a wide array of genealogy resources. Think of it like a Wikipedia for genealogy.
The FamilySearch Research Wiki team has been actively trying to grow the wiki so that it as effective as possible. Part of this initiative includes their Adopt-A-Wiki program whereby societies, archives or other family history organizations can sign up to help enrich and monitor specific pages.
Joining other USGenWeb State Projects, the NCGenWeb is pleased to announce our sponsorship of the North Carolina pages on the Wiki. Now when you visit one of the county pages, you’ll find a badge identifying the NCGenWeb as the adopter. Our goals as adopters are to help round out the pages with basic information to help get you started; similar to what we do anyway here at the NCGenWeb. Our collaboration with the Family History Library on this project provides you more access points for your research.
Beaufort County, NC Research Wiki Page
The benefit of the Wiki is that YOU can contribute directly to the page. A registration is required in order to make changes, but editing is as simple as using today’s standard Word processing programs. Here are some helpful links if you’d like to get started:
Bear with us as we spend the next few weeks enhancing the pages, but visit the wiki site to explore. If you have knowledge to share – add it! Others will benefit.
NCGenWeb Mentioned in Family Tree Magazine
The December 2010 issue of Family Tree Magazine includes a list of the “Best State Websites” for genealogy research. Guess what USGenWeb project appears in the list? the NCGenWeb!!!
There are two websites listed for North Carolina, the NC State Archives and NCGenWeb. Here are their comments for us..
Another standout from the USGenWeb Project, this North Carolina site offers a wealth of extras. The maps tracing the state’s confusing county formations are a must-bookmark, and the Digital Bookshelf <ncgenweb.us/nc/bookshelf> is a nifty guide to digitized titles of interest to Tar Heel State researchers.
A big shout-out to all of our county coordinators for their excellent work in making the NCGenWeb a must-go website for research in the state. For our researchers, we will continue to work diligently to bring you as many resources as we can to help you along. The full list contains a total of 75 websites and one other USGenWeb project is mentioned – our cohort in Iowa. Congratulations to Iowa too! Check out the full list on the Family Tree Magazine website – you’ll want to be sure you visit them if you haven’t already.
USGenWeb Feature Article
The USGenWeb Project helps researchers worldwide locate data and information for their family history research. The current National Coordinator for the USGenWeb Project is Sherri Bradley and she’s recently contributed an article on free genealogy resources for the Archives website.
The article is titled “Volunteer Projects Help Family Historians.” Not only does Sherri highlight the Project and associaed Special Projects, she also briefly covers other free resources – Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness and FamilySearch Indexing.
And most importantly, she reminds us all that the USGenWeb Project is volunteer-driven, so we all rely on your contributions to help enrich the sites. Sheri offers a number of suggestions for how you can get involved and begin to help contribute to these free resources.
Thanks to Sheri for the promotion of the Project! Please let us here at the NCGenWeb Project know if you have family information to share.
NC Statewide Information
The NCGenWeb Project announces the availability of the new NCGenWeb Statewide Information page. Jo Branch, our Coastal Counties Regional Coordinator, gathered a set of resources that have information pertinent to the state as a whole. How do you find the new page? Look on our sidebar under “Special Projects” to find the link:
or, you can access the page directly by going to http://www.ncgenweb.us/ncstate. Check out the new page and let us know what you think. Do you have resources you would like to see added?
New NC Genealogy 2.0 Page
Do you subscribe to RSS feeds? Do you have a Twitter (or follow) account? If so, then you may be particularly interested in a newly developed page here in the NCGenWeb Project — our NC Genealogy 2.0 page.
The NC Genealogy 2.0 page serves as a central location for bloggers & Twitters who share information relevant to NC Genealogy. The list includes
- individual bloggers
- various NC genealogy societies
- several feeds NC libraries with genealogy/historical emphasis
- feeds you can find from several NCGenWeb county pages.
Be sure to add these to your favorite RSS feed reader so you can easily stay current with goings on across the state.
We will continue to keep the page updates, so if you know of a feed we’ve missed, please let us know by sending email to ncgenwebproject at gmail dot com.
Upcoming Presentations at Duke
Would you like to hear the Archivist of the United States speak? If you are near the Durham area, there is an upcoming opportunity to do so - Duke is hosting two lectures that may be of interest:
- On March 3, 2010 – Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law and co-founder/faculty co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, will discuss “Gaming History: The Battle for Narrative Control in the Digital Age.”
- On March 22, 2010 – David Ferrerio, Archivist of the United States, will present a lecture titled “Are We Losing Our Memory? The View from the National Archives.”
Both lectures are free and open to the public. These are part of Duke’s Office of the Provost lecture series and more information can be found at http://www.provost.duke.edu/speaker_series/.
Now, interestingly enough, your host just realized that the very first Archivist of the United States was Robert Digges Wimberly Connor. I recognized the name immediately because RDWC (as I’ll call him) was from Wilson County, North Carolina and is a great-grandson of one of my family’s slaveholders, Robert Diggs Wimberly. RDW very likely owned my 4th great-grandfather, AllenWimberly (I don’t have proof yet, just A LOT of circumstantial evidence). RDWC graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1899, and now, thanks to their yearbook collection up to 1966 being online, you can find him listed in the 1899 Hellenian. As an item of note – Duke’s yearbooks are also being placed online.
But I digress…. check out these lectures if you can!
NCGenWeb Updates To Your Email
A new feature to the NCGenWeb project has been added to the site – you can now sign up to receive an email each time the blog is updated. Don’t worry – we won’t overflow your inbox; updates usually average somewhere around 1 -2 new blog posts each week. We use the blog to announce news and changes to county sites, share information on NC relevant resources, and sometimes offer tips to help with your genealogical research.
You can sign up for the email updates by clicking on the envelope icon on the right sidebar
or by visiting http://tinyurl.com/ybrolkd. Remember, if you use a RSS feed reader, you can subscribe to our feed by grabbing this URL.
We hope you join us!
