Documenting the American South
Southern U.S. research can be… um … challenging.
That’s a good word for amazingly annoyingly hair-pulling-out why-did-my-people-live-where-courthouses-burned frustrating.
Yesterday The Legal Genealogist got another dose of that frustration. I’m chasing one of my families through North Carolina, and they ended up in Rutherford County. That’s western North Carolina, between Charlotte and Asheville, and the area where they lived is now Cleveland County.1
The court minutes on this family are wonderful. Anything that specifically helps distinguish my guy from everyone else is crucial. Why? Because his name was John Jones.
So seeing the exact dates of every single event in his estate probate carefully recorded in the court minutes is terrific.
Only one problem.
The estate files themselves don’t survive.
There was a fire, see, in 19072… and there’s this very large gap in the estate papers in Rutherford County.
My guy’s early 1800s estate papers? Not there.
This sort of thing happens all the time in southern U.S. research. The records are gone, or they were never created in the first place, or some lightfingered Louie (sometimes wearing a Union uniform) made off with them.
Sigh…
So every single thing we can find to help out is a plus. And oh boy do we with southern U.S. ancestry have one big thing that helps out.
It bills itself as “a digital publishing initiative sponsored by the University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.”3 And it’s called Documenting the American South or DocSouth for short.
According to the website,
Documenting the American South (DocSouth)… provides access to digitized primary materials that offer Southern perspectives on American history and culture. It supplies teachers, students, and researchers at every educational level with a wide array of titles they can use for reference, studying, teaching, and research.
The texts, images, and other materials come primarily from the premier Southern collections in the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. These original Southern materials can be found in several library locations, including the Southern Historical Collection, one of the largest collections of Southern manuscripts in the country; the North Carolina Collection, the most complete printed documentation of a single state anywhere; the Rare Book Collection, which holds an extensive Southern pamphlet collection; and Davis Library, which offers rich holdings of printed materials on the Southeast.4
The 16 major collections of DocSouth offer an astounding array of resources to researchers. You can find a complete description here on the DocSouth Collections page. Among my personal favorites:
• “The Church in the Southern Black Community” traces the way Southern African Americans adopted and transformed Protestant Christianity into the central institution of community life.
• “The Colonial and State Records of North Carolina” includes documents and materials from throughout the country and from several European repositories covering the earliest days of North Carolina’s settlement by Europeans through the ratification of the United States Constitution.
• “First-Person Narratives of the American South” offers many Southerners’ perspectives on their lives by presenting letters, memoirs, autobiographies and other writings by slaves, laborers, women, aristocrats, soldiers, and officers.
• “North American Slave Narratives” documents the individual and collective story of African Americans’ struggle for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
• “Oral Histories of the American South” is a collection of over 500 oral history interviews with a southern focus on a variety of topics, including civil rights, politics, and women’s issues. Interviews can be read in text transcript form, listened to with a media player, or both simultaneously.
• “The Southern Homefront, 1861-1865” presents materials related to Southern life during the Civil War and the challenge of creating a nation state while waging war. This collection includes government documents, personal diaries, religious pamphlets, and many other materials.
There’s so much in each of these collections worth a long leisurely review.
Check it out.
Documenting the American South.
You won’t be sorry that you did!
SOURCES
- Cleveland County was formed from Rutherford and Lincoln Counties in 1841. See “North Carolina County Formation,” State Library of North Carolina (http://statelibrary.ncdcr.gov/ : accessed 12 Nov 2014). ↩
- See “Status of Courthouse Records in North Carolina,” North Carolina USGenWeb (http://www.ncgenweb.us/ : accessed 12 Nov 2014). ↩
- “About Documenting the American South,” Documenting the American South (http://docsouth.unc.edu/ : accessed 12 Nov 2014). ↩
- Ibid. ↩
Thanks Judy. As one third of my ancestors are also from the Rutherford/Cleveland area , this was most interesting. Just the maps alone are worth a visit to this site. Perfect timing – the weather has turned cold, so what is a few more hours on the computer?
Excellent! And if your families include Buchanans, Greens, Joneses or Pettypools, let’s talk…
Well my great grandfather was John Moore and he is my brick wall. So, when you say John Jones, I can sympathize!
Jones, Johnson, Moore, oh yeah… not easy research!
Do I ever know what you mean about missing Rutherford records…
I have a John Kinging/Kingen where [the microfilm of] the April and October 1798 minutes of the Rutherford County court show that his last will was presented and an inventory filed…
But you guessed it… neither the will nor inventory are extant…
There are, however, many other records still around. I am sure you know about the excellent work of The Genealogical Society of Old Tryon County [P.O. Box 938, Forest City, NC].
Some of your readers might be unaware of the many transcriptions of Rutherford, Lincoln, Polk, Cleveland, and even South Carolina records that appear in that society’s Bulletin. This group formed in 1972 and ever since has published a Bulletin with transcriptions and abstracts of many of the original records pertinent to that area. I regularly recheck the Bulletins whenever I learn that yet another ancestor passed through the general area between Charlotte and Asheville in NC or from York County to Greenville in SC.
Oh and, this guy with the non-extant will and inventory – John Kinging. His land patent was on the north fork of Green’s Creek. He also bought land on “Green Creek, south side of White Oak Creek.” That area is near the present Polk/Rutherford county line.
He appears on 1790 Rutherford Co., NC census, 2nd Company, as Jno. Kennens 2-1-4, name before is Samuel Young, Jr (1-0-2) and after are Sarah French and William Wood. Others in area include Music family, William Hawkins, ( 2-2-4 -11 slaves), Blackwells, John Earl[e] (4-2-9 – 12 slaves), Captain Sam Young. Area is of White Oak Creek.
Tax lists of 1782 Rutherford seem to lack this man; however, the area apparently was in Captain William Nevil’s Company, with Musicks, Wolfs (Wolf Pen creek??), Woods, Frenches, Sarah Battles, William Wood, and John Earle all in the area. I can show that at least some of these families came to the area from northern Virginia via Amherst, Albemarle, Bedford, and/or Campbell Counties, mostly before the Revolution.
Wonder if this Sarah Battles is related to your William Noel(l) Battles/Battlesby?
At least the will survives in my case… but oh… I’d so love to see the estate file…
Since all of my ancestors are from the southern states (NC and VA), I have experienced burned courthouses just as you have. Sigh…, but you are correct. The DocSouth records are fabulous. Thanks for reminding me of a set of records I do not use often enough!
Glad to help keep such a wonderful resource out in front!
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU JUDY for this share … had used it years ago, but have not been there in a while …… Missing documents in the south are a bane to every southern researcher from colonial times to the early 20th century ….. Wish other states would follow NC’s example ……
I’ll drink to that… we need every little snippet we can get!!
Thanks for a great article. My ancestors are also from the Eastern end of North Carolina to the most Western end and then into Greenville, South Carolina and from Eastern Tennessee to the Mississippi River and all with burned courthouses or lost records along the way. It doesn’t help that I also have a lot of poor ancestors who didn’t own land, pay taxes, or have guardian bonds- just lived on the fringes of society and appear in enough census records to know they existed.
Keep hunting! Even the poor left some tracks though they can be hard to find!
Ah, throw in a Rutherford or Cleveland County Bridges (as numerous as Jones in the area)and we at least share research pains if not kin! Thanks for the information!
At least two sons of my John Jones married Bridges daughters!
Judy,
I want to let you know that your blog post is listed in today’s Fab Finds post at http://janasgenealogyandfamilyhistory.blogspot.com/2014/11/follow-friday-fab-finds-for-november-14.html
Have a great weekend!
Thanks so much, Jana!