Deloris Williams, one of the NCGenWeb’s Assistant State Coordinators is featured in a news story today in the Greensboro News & Record.

The article highlights UNC’G’s Digital Library of American Slavery, a new database of data extracted from court & legislative records from 1775-1867.  The database contains more than 80,000 names of slaves from 15 states in the Southeastern US.

We have a link to the site on the African-American page, but if you read the article, it provides a great example of how useful this resource can be.  Way to go Deloris!

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.

Yours truly is a librarian and loves when I see library-related fare.  Therefore, I was just tickled pink when I saw what New Hanover County Coordinator Natasha did for the graphics for the site when she took over the county a few months ago. In her new site design, she’s replicated the look of a library catalog – isn’t that neat?

Natasha also has experience working in a library and it’s apparent that her experience translates well to her counties. The New Hanover site is well-organized into clearly identifiable sections that should be of great help to county researchers.

Once you get past the first page, Natasha has a nice antique feel to the pages to help put you in the mood of your family history research.  Along with pertinent information, each sub-page also has a “Related” section as well.

I happened to be visiting the New Hanover county site when I saw design as I was about to prepare a submission to the site – the index to a book of will abstracts of the county.  The index comes from a book compiled in 1981 by Mae Blake Graves.  If you find a will that you’re interested in seeing the abstract for, contact a library that holds the book and ask them about their procedures for requesting a photocopy of the page(s) of interest.  For future reference, you will find this linked at the bottom of the Wills page on the county site.

New Hanover Abstracts of Wills_Volume 1

From a fellow researcher and the NC State Archives Blog today I learned that the efforts of their newspaper digitization project is now available online.  For all of you NC researchers, you MUST go check this out!  Historical newspapers can offer glimpses into your ancestors’ past lives that can be extremely enlightening.

The NC project was begun in 2007 and contains papers from 1752 to the 1890s.  Some of the cities with coverage represented in their database include:

• Edenton (Chowan County) – 1787-1801
• Fayetteville (Cumberland County) – 1798-1795
• Hillsboro (Orange County) – 1786
• New Bern (Craven County) – 1751-1804
• Salisbury (Rowan County) – 1799-1898
• Wilmington (New Hanover County) – 1765-1816

The way the site is currently set up, it seems difficult to get an exact title list, but I will try to find out and share that information here.  A big KUDOS to the State Archives for providing this very invaluable resource!  Want to stay up-to-date with the goings on? You can follow the Twitter feed of the Information Management Specialist of the State Archives.  Click on the image below

If you’ve been doing African-American research in North Carolina you are probably familiar with the text, Somebody Knows My Name: Marriages of Freed People in North Carolina County by County by Dr. Barnetta McGhee White.   This book is an excellent resource as Dr. White searched records of many counties in the state to create this listing of marriages & cohabitations declared by blacks in North Carolina after the Civil War.   I’ve found several of my own ancestors mentioned in this book and her documentation of plantation records in Edgecombe County even led me to the identification of my ancestors’ slaveholders.

Recently,  Dr. White informed me that she has another resource on her website that is often overlooked – a documentation of all slaves mentioned in Granville County deeds from 1768-1864.  If you have enslaved ancestors from or near Granville County, you must check this out!  You can find her index at her website.

Granville county co-hosts Nola & Deloris have also added the link to the African-American resources page at the site, so you can also access it from there.

Have you checked out the website for Bladen County recently??  County coordinator Jason has redesigned the front pages of the site.  The “theme” of the site is called Parchment and I find it perfectly suited for a genealogy site, don’t you?

The Bladen site has a lot of great information on it so if you have family connections there, you will want to be sure to look around.  I have a family connection to Bladen myself; one of my great-grandmothers was born in Abbottsburg.

Today on one of the blogs I follow in my feed reader, Southern Graves, there was a posting of the tombstone of North Carolina governor Zebulon Baird Vance. Upon reading the post I decided to do a little more reading about Zebulon, for even though I knew the name, I don’t know much about him.  I commented on the blog post that the first time I knew anything about Zebulon was as a grad student at the University of North Carolina.  The financial aid office is in Vance Hall, which is named after him.  Someone obviously did not pay attention in her 8th grade North Carolina history class!

I did some online searching to see if I could locate an obituary for Zebulon, as I’m sure it must have been printed in many newspapers. Sure enough, I quickly found one in the Library of Congress’  Chronicling America newspaper collection.  Here is an obit that appeared in the 15 Apr 1894 issue of the San Francisco Call newspaper.

DIED FROM APOPLEXYWashington, Apr 14. — Senator Vance of North Carolina died at his home, 1726 Massachusetts avenue, this city, at 10:40 o’clock tonight.  He had a stroke of apoplexy this morning.  He had been suffering for some time from paralysis and a complication of diseases, but the end was sudden and unexpected, as he was regaining his health, and was thought to be on the road to recovery.  He was compelled during the winter to leave the Senate and go to Florida.  There he grew somewhat better, and in view of the struggle over the tariff returned to Washington.  He was a member of the Committee on Finance, but took little or not part in framing the present tariff bill. Zebulon Baird Vance was born in Buncomb [sic] County, North Carolina, May 13, 1830.  He was educated at Washington College, Tennessee, and at the University of North Carolina, where he studied law.  In 1852 he was admitted to the bar and established himself at Asheville, N.C., where was chosen County Solicitor, and in 1854 was elected to the Legislature. Vance was opposed to the secession of North Carolina, but after that step was taken he raised a company and soon afterward was appointed colonel of the Twenty-sixth North Carolina, a regiment that became the most famous organization of Southern soldiers.  (read more at the Library of Congress website)

The cities of Zebulon in Wake County & Vanceboro in Craven County are both named after him as well.  His papers are held in the UNC Southern Historical Collection. Do you have any research connections with Zebulon or his family?

The number of people worldwide investing in smartphones these days continues to rapidly increase.  While I have not done extensive research, from some quick online reading I’ve done, it seems the penetration in the US is at about 15 -20% (or about 12-15 million people)!   Yours truly in fact, just obtained my first smartphone this month, a Motorola Droid.

In light of this, as I’ve been playing around with my phone, I started to become curious – could I make the NCGenWeb site mobile phone compatible for the genealogists out there who may access us on their phones? Indeed, it turned out to be a very simple task!

Since this site is developed in WordPress, and WordPress has a large user community that provides plug-ins for all types of functionality, I quickly located the WPTouch plugin.  Within 5 minutes of finding it, I’d made the NCGenWeb site compatible for iphone and Android users.

If you have a smartphone, access the NCGenWeb page from it and you will find it redesigned to meet the dimensions of your phone.  The plug-in allowed me to set several options and on the smartphone display you can see the blog posts,  subscribe to the RSS feed, email the site to someone and more.  It is so cool!

If you would be willing – here is a 5 question survey to take;  I’m curious to know about people’s use of smartphones for accessing genealogy information.

If you’d like to learn more, you can view this 2 minute video clip I made:

Earl Bell, the new coordinator for Nash County, joined the NCGenWeb project.  Earl is a retired history teacher and has deep roots in Nash County.  Both of Earl’s parents are from Nash county and his maternal grandfather owned three stores in the area.  His paternal grandparents were among the founders of the Oak Level Baptist Church,.  No doubt, Earl will have lots to contribute to the site!

At the end of October, a redesigned version of the site was launched and since that time, Earl has been quite busy adding original content.  Highlight of some of the information he’s added include:

• illegitimate children mentioned in county court records from 1787-1835
• African-American surnames in the 1870 census of Liberty township
• Civil War Troops in the 47th Infantry, Company A

The new site can be viewed at http://www.ncgenweb.us/nash – check it out!