Province of South Carolina (1712-1776) Reliable Sources

Date: [unknown] to 4 Jul 1776
Location: [unknown]
Surnames/tags: Southern Colonies South Carolina

US Southern Colonies Project | Reliable Sources | Sources and Resources Directory | Province of SC Team Page

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This is the Reliable Sources page for the US Southern Colonies Project, Province of South Carolina (1712-1776) Reliable Sources, which includes profiles covered by pre-1700 project requirements.

This page contains sources focused on the period 1600-1776 recommended (or warned against) by WikiTree's US Southern Colonies Project.

Note: for resources pertaining to learning about the history of the US Southern Colonies, see: US Southern Colonies History.

Note: for creating a citation from a website that has not been provided see citing websites. Add the link from the page that you are sourcing.

• After finding a reliable source, care must be taken to establish that the source belongs to your profile.

The South Carolina Colony was founded by the British in 1663 and was one of the 13 original colonies. ^[1]

Contents 1 Reliable Sources 1.1 Vital Records 1.1.1 Births 1.1.2 Marriages 1.1.3 Deaths 1.2 Land Records 1.3 Probate Records 1.4 Tax Records 1.5 Other Records 2 Reliable Sources with conditions 2.1 Biographical Compilations 2.2 Surname / Family-Specific Compilations 2.3 Emigration / Passenger Lists 3 Unreliable Sources 3.1 Examples of Sources that Provide Uncertain Information 3.2 Colony Neutral / Multiple Colonies 4 Footnotes

Reliable Sources

Vital Records

Births

Marriages

• Marriage Notices in the South Carolina and American General Gazette from May 30, 1766, to February 28, 1781, and in its Successor the Royal Gazette (1781-1782) by A.S. Salley. (Columbia: State Co., 1914).

Deaths

• Indexes to the County Wills of South Carolina [1766-1864] by Martha Lou Houston. (1939. Reprint. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1964).

Land Records

• South Carolina Land Plats, 1731-1861
• Royal Land Grants, 1763-1764
• Warrants for Land in South Carolina, 1672-1711 by A.S. Salley. (1910. Reprint. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1973).

Probate Records

• Probate Records of South Carolina [1746-1821 ] by Brent H. Holcomb. 3 Vols. (Easley, SC: Southern Historical Press, 1977).

Tax Records

• South Carolina Tax List, 1733-1742 by Tony Draine. (Columbia: Congaree Publications, 1986).

Other Records

• Colonists and history
• The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine
• South Carolina Dept of Archives and History
• History of District 96

Land Records

• Warrants for Lands in South Carolina 1680-1692

Reliable Sources with conditions

Biographical Compilations

• The Huguenots of Colonial South Carolina by Arthur Henry Hirsch. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1928).
• History of the German Settlements and of the Lutheran Church in North and South Carolina: From the Earliest Period of the Colonization of the Dutch, German and Swiss Settlers to the Close of the First Half of the Present Century by G. D. Bernheim. (Philadelphia: Lutheran Book Store, 1872).
• Early Quaker Records of South Carolina, 1750-1815 Compiled by Thomas W. Marshall. (1933. Reprint. Nashville, TN: Historical Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, n.d.).
• Colonial families of South Carolina compiled by Motte Alston Read from many sources. (Salt Lake City, Utah : Filmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah, 1952).

Surname / Family-Specific Compilations

Emigration / Passenger Lists

Unreliable Sources

Examples of Sources that Provide Uncertain Information

Colony Neutral / Multiple Colonies

The following sources should not be cited and are subject to removal from project-managed profiles if found. If these are the only sources on a profile, please replace it with something better prior to removal.

• Yates' US and International Marriages Index. See this discussion for why.
• Millennium File: "created by the Institute of Family Research to track the records of its clients and the results of its professional research. It contains more than 880,000 linked family records, with lineages from throughout the world, including colonial America, the British Isles, Switzerland, and Germany. Many of these lineages extend back to nobility and renowned historical figures. In fact, one of the things the Millennium File focuses on is linking to European nobility and royalty."
• Edmund West Family Data collections, per their own description, "should be used to find primary sources."
• UNSOURCED user-contributed family trees, including (but not limited to):
  • Pedigree Resource Files on familysearch.org
  • Public or any other family trees from Ancestry.com
  • Geni.com - World Family Tree - RootsWeb / If the tree cites reliable proofs, find the proofs and cite them instead.
  • A personal family tree.
  • Find-A-Grave. Find-A-Grave profiles rarely cite reliable proofs. When they do, find the proofs and cite them.
  • Transcriptions of documents (wills, etc.) found online that are not published.
  • A discussion in a genealogy forum. If the discussion cites reliable proofs, find the proofs and cite them.
  • Books with family trees/family histories that do not cite reliable sources. These books are secondary sources and should be seen as a starting point. Further research is needed to confirm those relationships.

Additionally, it was very popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s to publish family genealogies. These are much like the online trees of today-- their quality varies depending on the extent to which they cite their sources. Some contain accurate information-- especially about the people living within the last 50 years prior to the publication date; but many have been subsequently proven to be incomplete, inaccurate, or in a few rare cases, downright fraudulent. Absent better sources, these old published genealogies can be cited or included under "See also:". A goal of the project, however, is to find more original documentation, closer to the time of the event being cited.

• Find-a-Grave is a user-contributed site, and as such is generally excluded from the list of reliable sources. Please do not make changes to a profile's vitals, including identification of relations, based solely on information transcribed on a Find-a-Grave profile. The exception is that if the Find-a-Grave profile contains a photo of a contemporaneous gravestone (i.e., a gravestone created and placed at the time of the person's death) and includes information about the person's death, you can cite the Find-a-Grave profile for the death information, and for other information that appears on the gravestone. Please understand, though, that even gravestones may contain erroneous information.
• Lineage Society Applications. Lineage societies such as Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), Society for Colonials Wars, and others, vary with regard to the proofs that they require for membership. And some, like DAR, have changed their rules over time. Therefore, such applications should be used more as finding aids than actual sources. When looking at a lineage society application, please check what sources they cite, and then seek to find those actual sources.
• Links to sources on paid subscription sites such as Ancestry, FindMyPast, and MyHeritage can be frustrating for WikiTree members and visitors without access to these sites. We recommend searching for a freely available copy of the source document on sites such as FamilySearch, Google Books, USGenWeb, Archive.org, or HathiTrust.

If the source record is only available to paid subscribers, when providing the URL please also extract as much information as possible, such as relevant names, dates, and the source of the original data.

Footnotes

1. ↑ Kelly, Martin. "Essential Facts About the South Carolina Colony." ThoughtCo, Feb. 11, 2020, thoughtco.com/south-carolina-colony-103881.

• South Carolina Archives: [1]
• South Carolina Society: [2]
• Kelly, Martin. "Essential Facts About the South Carolina Colony." ThoughtCo, Feb. 11, 2020, thoughtco.com/south-carolina-colony-103881.

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