Two New Resources
As we head into summer here in the NCGenWeb project we have been busy working on resources to help facilitate your family history research. Here are two new resources for the NCGenWeb Project that you should explore:
- NCGenWeb Digital Bookshelf – brings together full-text books available for free online that have relevance to NC genealogy. Initially, this focuses on books at the Internet Archive, but over time will expand to be more inclusive. Check the pages for resources for your county of interest. The inspiration for the layout of the site is drawn from the ever-so-useful deathindexes.com. Expect to see more items added in the upcoming months. Subscribe to the blog feed to stay up-to-date.
- North Carolina Yearbook Index – yours truly graduated this past May and as graduation approach I began to direct my available free time to complete phase I of the North Carolina Yearbook Index. We’ve posted before about the North Carolina yearbooks being added to the Internet Archive by the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. To date, hundreds of yearbooks from the 1800-present have been added. However, even though it is great to have access to such a wonderful resource, finding all those students from any particular county is a daunting task. Therefore, I created an index of students (mostly seniors at this point) listed in these yearbooks. Phase I’s focus of this project are on the 1930 and earlier yearbooks. To date, more than 16,000 names are in the searchable database. Phase II will include the integration of 1931-1940 yearbooks – look for more news within the next couple of months. Look for county-specific links to be added to various NCGenWeb project pages during the upcoming weeks.
Digital NC
Are you ready to view a beautiful website?
I’ve posted before on the site about the digitization efforts at the University of North Carolina. They have partnered with the Internet Archive and are actively digitizing many of the materials in their collection. The Carolina Digital Library & Archives is the central website describing the digitization program.
Now, as part of their network of websites, UNC is launching Digital NC, the website to showcase the materials digitiaed as part of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center is housed in the North Carolina Collection in Wilson Library at UNC and their efforts are certainly to be applauded!
Digital NC Website - http://digitalnc.org/
The Digital NC website currently features the following collections:
- NC Yearbooks — hundreds of yearbooks from across the state. Not all of the yearbooks currently listed on the NCGenWeb Digital Bookshelf: Yearbooks page are included, so you’ll be sure to want to check both resources.
- Digital Davie - i includes materials on Davie County pioneers, the Revolutionary War, Education, the formation of the county, etc., with more planned
- Durham Urban Renewal Records - plans for the urban development plans from the 1960s and 1970s. . Records can be searched or browsed by street name, property owner name, or project number.
- Wilson County WWII Veterans — information and memories of county veterans
- Images of NC — images from across the state organized by city; includes postcards from the NC Postcard Collection
The site is still growing so you’ll want to check it often; the News Archive is here and hopefully they’ll provide a RSS feed soon.
New NC Databases from LDS
Many of you may be aware that the Church of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has been working on initiatives to create online databases of some of the content in their vast holdings. With the assistance of volunteer efforts, we continue to reap the benefits of these tremendous projects. During a recent conference, the LDS announced a new set of databases added to the FamilySearch website. Of the many collections added were several of particular interest to North Carolina researchers. These include:
- North Carolina Births & Christenings 1866-1964
- North Carolina Deaths & Burials 1898-1994
- North Carolina Marriages 1759-1979
- North Carolina, Davidson County Vital Records, 1867-1984 (no index, browse images only)
To date, these collections do not include images of the data, but the indexed information can be highly valuable. In the case of the Davidson County records, so far, only the images are available, but they can be worthwhile of course. And remember, FamilySearch does offer indexed images of North Carolina Death Certificates from 1906-1930!
Add these resources to your must-search list – you are sure to find something of relevance for your North Carolina searching.
Historical NC Papers in Google News Archive
Google News Archive has recently implemented a new feature which makes it 10 times easier to browse through the thousands of pages of historical newspapers they a) acquired from Paper of Record and b) have been digitizing.
The new feature allows you to browse the issues & you see them in a convenient date sorted format. While I’ve been aware that there are NC newspapers digitized, until now, it’s been difficult to know exactly how many issues from each paper have been included.
North Carolina papers you’ll find in their collection are below, but note, the indicated time span does not mean every issue is included — be cognizant that there are gaps:
- Cumberland County: Fayetteville Observer — 1939-2002 (240+ issues)
- Davidson County: Times-Dispatch – 1889-2007 (14,000+ issues)
- Henderson County: Times-News – 1890-1927 (6,800+ issues)
- New Hanover County: Wilmington Star-News – 1962-2007 (almost 11,000 issues)
- Polk County: Polk County News – 1902-1926 (600+ issues)
In addition to these papers, there are papers digitized from other states around the county, as well as from other countries. I’ve compiled a list of papers I’ve found in the Archive, though the list is likely not to be complete. You can view a spreadsheet here.
Here are some aspects of Google News Archive that you’ll need to know about in order to use the site most effectively.
1) When you click on a link to view the digitized issues be sure to click the advance button if you don’t see more than one column of papers. There are gaps in the collection so even though the screen view may show 40-50 years time span, there may be a big gap in the collection.
2) You can change the view displayed by using the drop down menu in the top left corner of the screen. I personally recommend the “decade” view for a quick overview and the “year” view for finer tuning. Other views available include “month,” “week,” & “day”
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?
Online Family Research Classes
Dick Eastman announced on his blog yesterday that the Family History Library in Salt Lake City now offers their research classes online for free!
Take advantage of these videos to brush up or learn research techniques that can help you in your family research. The videos can be found here.
UNC-Chapel Hill Yearbooks Online
Earlier this month I posted about Elon College’s online collection of yeabooks; in this post, I’d like to share the fact that UNC-Chapel Hill Library has a collection of their yearbooks, the Yackety Yack, online at the Internet Archive. Browsing through the yearbooks can be informative, seeing the pictures of the students and their class photos. The Yackety Yack has some interesting art in it as well.
Commencement Artwork from 1901 Yackety Yack
The oldest one currently on the site is the 1901 yearbook, the first issue with that name, previously, it was called the Hellenian. The senior class have a variety of information written about them, from their hometown to the activities & organizations in which they participate. I was pleasantly surprised too seeing early in the yearbook the name of a person in a family that I’ve been helping another researcher learn more about – the Picot’s of Washington & Halifax counties. On the Board of Trustees is listed Dr. Louis Julien Picot.
1901 UNC Board of Trustees
As is par for the course for texts at the Internet Archive, you can either browse these online or download them in a variety of file formats (even Kindle!).
The years of the Hellenian available include: 1890 | 1891 | 1892 | 1893 | 1894 | 1895 | 1896 | 1897 | 1898 | 1899 | 1900
The years of Yackety Yack include: 1901 | 1902 | 1903 | 1904 |1905 | 1906 | 1907 | 1908 | 1909 | 1911 | 1910 |1912 | 1913 | 1914 | 1915 | 1916 | 1917 | 1918 | 1919 | 1920 | 1921 | 1922 | 1923 | 1924 | 1925 | 1926 | 1927 | 1928 | 1929 | 1930 | 1931 | 1932 | 1933 | 1934 | 1935 | 1936 | 1937 | 1938 |1939 | 1940 | 1941 | 1942 | 1943 | 1944 | 1945 | 1946 | 1947 | 1948 | 1949 | 1950 | 1951 | 1952 | 1953 | 1954 | 1956 |1957 |1958 |1959 | 1960
Update: more years do indeed seem to be coming in since I originally posted. I’ll add links here as they become available: 1961 | 1962 | 1963
This collection represents just a small portion of the many books that UNC makes available at the Internet Archive. What started out as a one-year experiment seems to be going strong.
Digital Southern Historical Collections
Just had to share this news from the UNC Southern Historical Collections – today they unveiled a new digital collection of African-American Resources. Thirty-five of their collections w/ more than 8,600 items make up the first installment of this amazing resource.
In addition to materials relevant to NC history, the new digital offerings include materials from other southern states as well.
You can read more at http://www.lib.unc.edu/blogs/news/index.php/2010/01/digital-shc/.
Have fun exploring!
Elon College Yearbooks Online
Do you have research interests in Alamance county? If so, you may be interested in knowing that Elon College now has their yearbook collection from 1913-2009 available online! The blog of the Belk Library at Elon College recently posted an announcement to their blog, Under the Oaks.
The collection is hosted at the Internet Archive and the interface is quite easy to use and navigate. You can view the yearbooks online, or you can also download PDF versions of any edition for viewing on your own computer. Both black & white and color versions are available. There is even a beta Kindle version!
This is an absolutely wonderful resource if your research interests are around Elon. Your webmaster here applied to Elon for college too but ultimately decided to go elsewhere; imagine if I’d had! My picture would be here too!
A treasure trove of information is just waiting to be discovered in these books. For example, this is a picture of the Junior Class of 1913
Elon College: Junior Class 1913
The motto of the class was “Nihil nisi optimum” which means “nothing but the best is good enough.”
The class flower was the Violet, and the colors were Black & Gold.
The class members were:
S.S. Myrick
C.C. Johnson
M.S. Revel
Grace Rollings
Bettie Ellis
J.F. Morgan
Nina Pinnix
Ethel Barrett
Sallie Foster
Vera Gray
Anyone know who the young child may be?? I’m puzzled over that one 
A big hurrah to the team involved in making this available to researchers!
NC Immigration Patterns
In the Dec/Jan 2010 issue of Internet Genealogy, one of the websites reviewed was the New York Times online interactive map that shows immigration patterns in the United States from 1880-2000, their Immigration Explorer.
It is an interesting site to explore; you can zoom down to the individual county level for any state and see the percentage of residents that are foreign-born. This snapshot of Wake county, where our state capital Raleigh lies, shows that in 1880, of the 48, 203 residents, only 245 (0.5%) were foreign born with the largest group of immigrants from Western Europe.
In 1930, there were 95,206 residents with 449 residents foreign-born (0.47%). Western Europe is still reflective of the largest group, but the numbers are not as high as in 1880.
In 1970, there were 233,444 residents with 4,991 foreign-born (2.13%) but now the largest group of immigrants are of Asian/Middle Eastern descent.
In 2000, we see another shift in Wake County. Of 687,918 residents 60,072 (8.7%) were foreign-born and now the largest group is from Latin America.
It’s interesting to explore how the make-up of each of the counties. Check out your county of interest and see what you learn. While this does not add data to our research at the individual level, it does help to set a perspective on the ethnic compositions of our counties.
