I Love GenWeb

Under my "South Carolina Links" on the left side of this blog there is a new link: Greenville County South Carolina GenWeb. This link should have been there from the very beginning, but I only thought to add it today. I have found a tremendous amount of information at this GenWeb site, including annotated census listings, a number of historical maps of Greenville County, and some really useful links. One of these links is to the Sixteenth South Carolina, CSA. I originally went to the site to see which censuses show a certain Jordan Moore and who his neighbors are in that census (I have reason to believe he was related to my Samuel Moore and I want to know more, because a Jordan Moore might actually be much easier to trace than my Samuel and his probable brother John). While I was "wandering around" on the site, I found the link to the 16th, since I know that one of the Greenville Moores, William Spencer Moore (the nephew of my great-great grandfather William Spencer Moore) served in the Sixteenth during the Civil War. I found him on the roster as a First Sergeant in Company A and was shocked to read that after being wounded and captured at Nashville on 16 December 1864, he was sent to the notorious Camp Douglas in Chicago. Camp Douglas was known as the "Andersonville of the North" and is said to be the site of the largest known mass grave in the Western Hemisphere. It is alleged that at the time he was sent to Camp Douglas (December 1864), the prison camp held 12,000 prisoners.

I went to Ancestry to confirm this and found two records showing that he had been held at Louisville Prison after being captured on the 16th and was transferred from there to Camp Douglas on the 21st. I also wrote to a couple of cousins on the Moore side who are descended from him, and one of them wrote back with an item he had written on William Spencer Moore which mentioned that he had been imprisoned in Illinois.

This is not the first time that a GenWeb site has provided me with or pointed me to some very helpful information on my ancestors. My early research on the Moores was made possible by my discovery of a transcription of my great-grandfather Harlston Perrin Moore's death certificate on the Dallas GenWeb site. GenWeb sites vary greatly in content, but it is always worthwhile to check out the GenWeb site for any location where your ancestors have lived. Ancestry has a lot of great databases, but often the information on GenWeb sites will go well beyond that, especially in transcriptions and in the location-related arrangement of data and links. In this case, hats off to Mel Odom, the coordinator for the Greenville GenWeb website.

Jim Wheat's Dallas County Texas Archives

Jim Wheat's Dallas County Texas Archives (see link at left) is one of my favorite genealogy websites. During the first couple of weeks of my initial dabbling in genealogy, I made my first real "find" on this website: a transcription of the death certificate for my great-grandfather Harlston Perrin Moore (my mother's paternal grandfather). Until this point the only information I had for him was "? Perrin Moore" in a genealogy for my mother's mother's family. It did not seem right that there was so little information on him. In addition to his full name, Harlston Perrin Moore, the transcript gave the names of his parents -- Spencer Moore and Emily Tarrant -- and his date of death, 12 December 1921. It also provided Lancaster, Texas as the place of death/local address. This was the clue that made me certain that this was the correct Perrin Moore, because I knew that my mother's family came from this part of Dallas County. Recently I have been able to look at a digital image of the death certificate at the Family Search pilot site and fill in additional information not contained in the transcript.

Since then my research has brought me back to this site many times. There are many different categories of information to be found here, including transcripts of newspaper articles, cemetery listings, maps, pioneers, recollections, city directories, obituaries, and much more.