Friday, November 28, 2008

Death Certificates and Obituaries from Greenville, SC

Yes, another cheerful title for a blog post. Previously it was Texas death certificates from the Family Research pilot site (see link under "General"); now I am focusing on death in South Carolina. Texas and South Carolina are my top two research states, and these obituaries and certificates are certainly advancing my research.

The inspiration for obtaining these materials was a posting on the Rootsweb mailing list for Greenville, SC, by a researcher who is local to the area and will obtain and mail the obituaries for a nominal fee. She was extremely helpful and also volunteered to acquire copies of death certificates for some of the people in the obituaries. Some of the Greenville obituaries cover people in Anderson County, SC, as well, so there were several descendants of my great-great grandparents William Spencer Moore and Emily Tarrant Moore, but the majority were for descendants of William Spencer Moore's brother, Bud Mathis Moore. I realized that I need to "strike while the iron is hot" and start entering data on the Bud Mathis Moore family in my genealogy program so that I could find additional names for obituary and death certificate requests, so it has been the Bud Mathis Moore family that I have been researching lately. (A note of explanation: I have been inputting information into my genealogy program by levels, from parents to grandparents, then all the great-grandparents, and I was at the great-great grandparent level. Doing the Bud Mathis Moore family actually means going back to the great-great-great grandparent level, since this means doing the family of Samuel Moore, father of William Spencer and Bud Mathis. Samuel Moore is as far back as I have been able to go at this point, and I do not yet know who his wife was.)

The Moores are one of my main areas of research, and I have benefitted greatly from information shared with me by other researchers. My original discovery that my gg-grandfather William Spencer Moore had a brother named Bud Mathis Moore was due to a posting by a descendant of B. M. Moore, Mary Newton. She introduced me by e-mail to several other descendants and we got in touch with another B.M. Moore descendant who had researched the family. The Bud Mathis Moore connection led to the Greenville connection as the point of origin for William Spencer Moore, and this helped me find the will for his and Bud's father Samuel Moore (establishing him as their father) on the South Carolina Archives website. Recently, while researching the B.M. Moore family, I found two other people who had a lot of information on that family. So there is quite a large body of information on descendants of Samuel Moore of Greenville District, South Carolina, which I expect to be supplemented by more obituaries and death certificates. So ... it appears that this compilation of Samuel Moore descendants will be one of my big projects (I would be something like an editor and co-compiler with the other researchers).

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