The Dead Librarian

Friday, May 10, 2013

South Carolina Digital Library links

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Newspaper updates

The Library of Congress recently added 33,000 new SC newspaper pages to Chronicling America. For researchers in the midlands the addition of newspapers from the Winnsboro area will be particularly rewarding. This update also includes the first batch of antebellum newspapers from Edgefield newspapers.

Read the latest post from the SC Digitial Newspaper blog for specifics. Also the link to Chronicling America is provided in the "Online Newspapers" section to the right of this post.

Friday, March 15, 2013

South Carolina Mental Health cemetery survey

Finding public records and making them accessible is a painful process. Whenever internet access is mentioned the territorial curtain goes up. Every now and then, however, someone does something that make my "open access heart" soar. On a lark, I called someone at the SC Dept of Mental Health about the sanitorium records. I found a remarkable public servant who has a passion for the history of the instutition and happily shares with others. In fact she shared with me a nearly 10,000 record survey of burials in SCDMH cemeteries and gave me permission to put the list online.

Right now the survey is available as a list only. I promise to get it into our obituary index soon so it is keyword searchable but the Ancestry list can be searched with "Control-f". I am not overly fond of our arrangement with Ancestry to store records but for the purpose of getting this doc accessible quickly it worked fine.

Records are sealed for 75 years. Records earlier than March 15, 1938 (tomorrow it be from March 16, etc) can be obtained at the SC Dept of Archives and History. Records 75 years to present will have to be obtained from the SCDMH. You can contact Katherine Roberts (803) 898-8304.

I asked the archives to look up four records from the list. They found something on all four. Available records and information will vary.

1.Allen Leard: #13714 Admitted September 19, 1908 Died July 18, 1909 (Record of Deaths S190038 Vol. 2 (1904-14) pp. 76-77

2. Mattie Graves #15335 Admitted April 28, 1911. Died May 9, 1911 (Records of Deaths S190038 Vol. 2 (1904-14) pp. 104-105

3. Willie Tisdale #16428 Admitted October 1, 1912. Died December 27, 1912 (Record of Deaths S190038 Vol. 2 pp. 142-143

4. Meg/Mag Anderson #4510 Admitted June 18, 1885 Died November 3, 1899 (Record of Deaths S190038 Vol. 1 (1893-1903) pp. 58-59

SCDMH survey

Previous SCDMH records post

Friday, January 25, 2013

Updates

Just a couple of updates today. The SC Death Index for 1950-1962 is back up and they have added 1962. Hurrah! Previous post here.

Also, HeritageQuest has started to add the 1940 census. Not every state is indexed, including SC, but they state that indexing will be completed in 2013. Now what about the indexing for 1930...?

Saturday, January 5, 2013

South Carolina Equity Court Records

It has been a very interesting research month. I have had the distinct pleasure of researching and learning about the South Carolina Equity Court records at the South Carolina Archives. What an interesting set of records these turned out to be.

Let me give you a bit of background on SC Court records. During the antebellum period there were three civil courts: Common Pleas, Probate and Equity.  The Equity court, essentially, covered everything the other two didn't want to deal with.  The Equity records are complicated Amazingly enough the Equity Court records are indexed on the Digital Library on American Slavery.

Before you jump to the index let me tell you what it can and can not do. For this research I was looking for information about someone who died intestate around 1814. The will was needed to determine lineage.  A name search in the Digital Library on American Slavery came up with a hit in 1816. Because he died intestate the family had to go through the Equity Court to settle the estate. Nice, being intestate was not a dead end!

The indexed American Slavery record does not list all the names in the equity file but it does list all of the slave names.  In this case the son was listed in the will but I had to look at the original document to determine he was there.

There is a microfilm index at the SC State Archive of all the court records. It is in the original handwriting so can be tough to look through but it does list every name in the file so the son was indexed in the microfilm index but not the American Slavery site. Slave names are indexed in the American Slavery site but not the microfilm index.

Phew! The SC State Archive staff can look up the record from the American Slavery citations. In my case 1 out of every American Slavery records had a poor citation. I was able to locate the miscited records by looking through the microfilm index. Be prepared to pay a fee for the SC Archive to locate the record. Don't complain. I spent alot of time researching the citations, probably three hours, and time is money.

So there it is. This is a great set of records for genealogical research.

Monday, November 19, 2012

Planning my National Day of Listening reminded me how important it is to talk about family history with all of the family not just the most senior members. While having breakfast with my cousin last summer I was bemoaning how difficult it had been tracking down our great grandmother. I declared that, "after twenty years of searching I discovered she changed her name!". My cousin looked at me strangely and said she knew that bit of history because she clearly remembered, years ago at a family gathering, our grandmother and her sister laughing about how often they had to change their last name to "get out of dodge" for one thing or another when they were little girls.

:0 < That's me speechless! I would never have wasted my money and time on searching for a Ford family if I had known that was an alias. My goal this year, on National Listening Day, is to listen to everyone! What stories do my cousins remember? They have totally different sets of recollection that can add depth and value to the family history.

If you would like more information about the National Day of Listening visit the Low Country Africana web site. They are our SC sponsors of this event. You can also "like" it on Facebook:

Thursday, November 1, 2012

South Carolina Death Certificates #3

The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control vital records website is an important resource for locating SC death certificates and death dates.

Ancestry and Familysearch have the largest offering of digitized death certificates but their collections end at 1955.

South Carolina law allows a new year of death certificates to be released to the public every January. Since Ancestry first digitized the death certificates 6 years have flown by and there are now publicly available death certificates through 1961.

The index for these new records is only available online on the SCDHEC vital statistics website. Only the index is available so don't get too excited. Fortunately it is keyword searchable at the bottom of the page. The searchable index allows researchers to search 1950-1961.

Don't try to download their funky software to view the earlier indexes. You can access that information with a keyword search on Ancestry or Familysearch. Just use this site to search the years 1950-1961 (soon to be 1962. Yeah!).

When you locate the name you are looking for you can request a death certificate from the SC State Archives, Greenville Public Library or the SC Room at the Florence Public Library. Charleston Public might have them but I can't confirm that.

You can also use the death date information to locate an obituary. That is what I usually do. In most cases, the obit will give you more information than the death certificate.