A Trip to the Past - Part 1

The first week in November I took a trip back in time.

Actually, I took the camper down to South Carolina to attend a Revolutionary War re-enactment in Camden. My ancestors lived in Camden, during the Revolutionary War — I had to go! This was a perfect opportunity to glimpse what their lives would have been like.

I took a few extra days to research my English family. Thursday I went to the South Caroliniana collection at the University of South Carolina. I wanted to find two sources that books on the English family had referenced: John Cousar's book, Quaker Turned Presbyterian, and Elisabeth Doby English's Descendants of Joshua English. I was excited to finally see them with my own eyes. The former turned out to be a book and the latter was a manuscript.

The South Caroliniana Collection

You can't take pictures of documents in the collection, and I wished I could have taken Cousar's whole book home, there was so much information in it! I wrote notes like crazy and was quickly overwhelmed. The book has paper covers and looks like something that would have had a small print run (i.e. not easy to find a copy).

English's book was more of an extensive family tree, and I took some notes and decided to order copies of the pages with my part of the family, and the branches that lived in the area near the time of the Revolution.

I looked at a few microfilms and then ran out of time. Since parking is difficult at USC and I found the two books that were my goals, I decided to spend tomorrow researching in Camden.