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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
(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...
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...
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...
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...
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...