I was recently asked by Wake County Public Libraries to give a virtual Zoom presentation on fascinating but little known facts about colonial North Carolina history. In this presentation, I talked about the Lost Colony, the Tuscarora War and how it led directly to the...
It's always a good idea to look at original records yourself. More than once, I've seen a transcription that gets a name wrong and seeing the original document winds up solving a mystery. If you haven't already seen them, there are plenty of tax list images over at NC...
It's time for some myth-busting. There are a couple of persistent ones that surround this family. "Thomas Laughinghouse came to America about 1750..." The first comes down to us via Henry T. King's Sketches of Pitt County: There are several problems with this...
(This article was originally published July 25, 2018. It was most recently updated June 6, 2019.) It's now worth investigating the possibility that Harriet Morris is a daughter of Thomas Morris of Beaufort County and granddaughter of Elisha Morris. While Laban...
I'm sure many of you Joyner researchers have already sorted this out, but I'm still trying to make sense of who's who. I'm going to start posting information about the Joyner family of Pitt County, primarily focusing on items spanning the colonial era to the...
There were at least two Amon Joyner living contemporaneously in Craven and Pitt Counties. How they are related is a complete mystery to me. I do know they are not the same man nor is one the father of the other, or at least if he is, not legitimately so. The Amon...
UPDATE (5 May 2019) - Turned out it is NOT one of the Hemby girls as I had wondered about in the article below.</strong> Thankfully, the exercise of using ThruLines to parse through Ancestry results gave me some good practice and helped me better understand the...
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,...
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...
This new series will attempt to correct records, one family branch at a time, that have mushroomed across the online genealogical communities. Ok... I'm not going to claim that I don't have any mistakes in my enormous tree on Ancestry. I've been working on...
I do descend from the GRIFFIN family of Pitt County, though I'll admit I haven't spent much time researching them beyond my direct line (If you're curious: James GRIFFIN > Josiah GRIFFIN + Patsey WHITEHEAD > James GRIFFIN + Rebecca Ann SMITH > Harriet A.E....