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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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!