Pitt County was formed after Beaufort and Craven Counties, but the establishment of its border wasn’t a one-time thing. Below, you can read about the formation of Pitt County, North Carolina from David Leroy Corbitt’s book, The Formation of North Carolina Counties, 1663-1943. See if it helps some pieces start falling into place with some […]
Formation of Craven County, North Carolina
Read the descriptions below for Craven County’s shifting borders and see if it helps some pieces start falling into place with some of your ancestors who seem to appear and vanish from this and neighboring counties inexplicably in the mid-to-late 1700s and into the 1800s. Remember, The Formation of North Carolina Counties, 1663-1943 by David […]
Formation of Beaufort County, North Carolina
The Formation of North Carolina Counties, 1663-1943 by David Leroy Corbitt is available for free at Archive.org, but for convenience’s sake, over the next few days I’m going to post the sections on the formation of Beaufort County (including Bath County), Craven, and Pitt Counties here at East Carolina Roots, since the bulk of the […]
Be careful with assumptions about “Verified” DNA relationships and those AncestryDNA “Hints”
Long story short: Hints shared with your AncestryDNA matches are only as good as the data that both of you have in your trees. This has been bothering me quite a bit and I decided I finally ought to just write something about it. I think it’s important enough that I may have the person […]
Did you know all of these new records were at FamilySearch? I’ve got all of the links right here!
FamilySearch has been steadily putting a ton of North Carolina records on their site that aren’t yet easy to access through the normal browsing methods. (Another thanks to Becky for tipping me off about some of the great new things that have gone up over the last few months!) Anyhow, I decided to compile a […]
Merry Christmas to us! 🎄 Beaufort County Deeds now available online!
A great big GIGANTIC thank you to East Carolina Roots visitor Becky, who graciously commented on an earlier post about available deeds online that Beaufort County deeds are now available via FamilySearch. YES! Celebrating the birth of my LORD and Savior Jesus Christ is absolutely exciting enough for me, but now I get the added […]
Buyer Beware: Make sure you know THIS about AncestryDNA before you buy a kit!
I have been recommending AncestryDNA here on this site for the past several months now because I’ll be the first to admit it’s much easier to use than FamilyTreeDNA (FTDNA) in terms of seeing possible shared ancestor hints and locations of the ancestors of your matches. In addition, they’ll generate matches further back in your genealogical history […]
Using AncestryDNA? For goodness’ sake! Please post a tree!
Some amazing things are happening right now in our family thanks to several of us taking the AncestryDNA test. We’re on the verge of solving the puzzle of our Whitford family origins (In other words, did we come from Scotland, as was long suggested, or perhaps somewhere else?) — a subject that has mystified many […]
East Carolina Roots now recommends AncestryDNA for genealogy testing
(Get $10 off the AncestryDNA test! Link is below.) Thanks to many modern advances, such as the internet and genetic testing, we can now break through genealogy barriers that have stumped our forebears for generations. In the past, East Carolina Roots has recommended using FamilyTreeDNA for autosomal DNA testing, but now, based on my own […]
Researching Pitt County? Snap this up while it’s still available!
Pitt County can present some challenges for genealogy researchers. It was one of the North Carolina counties that suffered destruction of records by fire — in this case, the courthouse was burned in 1857. Still, there are some wonderful resources if you know where to look! Aside from the obvious internet places like Ancestry.com and FamilyTree.org, […]
The strange tale of the Craven County woman who gave birth AND signed a deed in Pitt County in the years after her 1816 death
According to publicly-accessible family trees at Ancestry.com, a Craven County woman named Jemima MILLS, said to be a daughter of Nasby MILLS and Keziah HUNTER or Keziah WALLACE or Keziah Hunter WALLACE, was born about 1760, then married a Craven County man named Gideon PETTIT. Some trees record this happened sometime around 1812, while others do […]
A FREE Research Goldmine for Genealogists
Since 1996, Archive.org has been quietly building one of the best online FREE libraries in existence. I’m fairly certain they’ve got the Google books database beat. There you can find old texts such as the Hotten’s Lists of Original Persons of Quality (something you’ll pay quite a bit to search on Ancestry.com) or the Calendar of State […]
Researching Apprentice Records
When researching one’s genealogy, an often neglected resource is a county’s apprenticeship bonds. At times, children apprenticed out were poor orphans. Many other times, the children being bound out simply had the misfortune of being born to non-white parents, or of having a father who died without specifying in a will that the children’s mother […]
Just because it’s on a sign, doesn’t mean it’s true
If you’re ever in the Old Burying Ground in Beaufort, NC and see this sign, just know it’s wrong. The “Tuscarora War,” which was actually an Indian War that included militants from multiple tribes, wasn’t fought anywhere near the town of Beaufort. On September 22, 1711, a group of more than 500 men, comprised of Tuscarora, […]
Create a historical calendar, with moon phases
Have you ever wondered what day of the week a historical event happened? Or what about what kind of moon was in the sky during that blustery February in eastern North Carolina when the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge was fought? Well, now you can have your answers. I got the idea to actually plot […]
Gen-101: 10 Advanced Search Engine Tricks
When you go to Google to search for your ancestors, how do you do it? You may think you know how to search for things on the Internet, but there are some advanced tricks and tips you can employ to take your searches even further. The following are Advanced Search techniques which I have modified […]
Genealogy 101: How to research your family tree
You’ve finally decided to start researching your family tree. Congratulations! You are about to embark on a wonderful, exciting, sometimes frustrating, sometimes tearful, but mostly joy-filled journey back into the past to find your ancestors and get to know them. Whatever your reasons for beginning your search, the basics of how to get started are […]
Top Ten Genealogy Research Sites
Depending on where you live in the world, or more accurately, where your ancestors lived in the world, you might find there are other sites of greater use to you, but here in eastern North Carolina, where my family has lived for about 300 years, I find these sites have been most helpful to me. […]
Did your ancestors, or their siblings or children leave North Carolina? If so, read this…
I had never even heard of Goodspeed’s Histories until Roger Kammerer of Pitt County Family Researchers told me about them. He said they were like the Pitt County Chronicles books for the 1800s. The publications can be a great resource for finding little biographies on ancestors who were living in the late 1800s, when the […]
How do your ancestors fit into North Carolina history?
If your genealogical research has largely been limited to Ancestry.com, the NC GenWeb and perusing county records at your local library, court house or Register of Deeds, then perhaps it’s time to go a bit deeper with your research. If you can take your ancestors back before the mid-1800s, then you might need to start […]
