Now that the weather is starting to get milder, it is time to get out and explore. We need to stretch our legs and our minds. If you get an itch to explore locally, enjoy this wonderful offering from the National Park Service.  Raleigh: A Capital City - A National Register of Historic Places Travel Itinerary When you are ready to roam, you can open this handy travel guide right on your phone to choose your day's adventure. There is a wonderful portable travel guide features a a brief overview on the town and a list of historical sites to visit. (Note - Use the links at the footer of the page. Quite a few of the links in the header are broken. There is a wealth of information still active and accessed at the bottom of the page.) One of these links you will want to keep handy is the one for the Early History of Raleigh  (bottom of page) but is a wonderful thumbnail sketch of  Raleigh's history from the days of Joel Lane up to the growth of suburbs im the mid-20th Century....

What could these three Raleigh icons have in common?  Why the very ground they sat on! This parcel of land between Hillsborough, Horne and Brooks streets was home to all three. The Old State Fairgrounds was established in 1873 and hosted the fair until 1925.  At the outset of World War 1, the large flat expanse of land that was the Fairgrounds was appropriated for military housing and training as it made an excellent site for tank maneuvers. At the end of the war the Fairground activities were in full swing again and two racetracks were built on the site. Over time, the financial burden of second racetrack resulted in the sale of the land to create the Fairmont subdivision,  but portions of that land proved too sunken and muddy for building.  The City of Raleigh bought these compromised sites to create a park and the rose garden. The theater was built in the mid-1930s.  As a frequent visitor to the Raleigh Little Theater Rose Garden, I was very surprised to lear...

The Spring 2024 Issue (Vol. 7, Issue 3) of our award-winning newsletter, Wake Genealogy Watch, is now available online for reading or download. You can visit the  WCGS website   or access through this link -  Wake Genealogy Watch, Spring 2024.   Features in this issue include: Read details of the recent unveiling ceremony for a new Historic Marker in Holly Springs. We are seeking a webmaster volunteer. Read the details and volunteer information here. Find RootsTech 2024 highlights including links to selected presentations, and the whole on demand schedule. Research tip – Finding Prisoners and other special populations in post-1900 Census Records Have fun exploring selected topics from the Wake Treasures Journal contents, now available to all. Featured collections are linked in this issue. Explore the Biofile image collection online at Allied Families. This vast collection comprises yea...

A historical marker was  installed in Holly Springs in late January. The marker  commemorates Revolutionary War Patriot Christopher Woodward’s mill and store; and also nearby Rev War era Camp Middle Creek  where Lt. Col. Hardy Sanders mustered troops to protect the North Carolina legislature during the Revolutionary War.   The marker was placed at Virginia Creek Drive near the corner of Sunset Lake Road, at the entrance to Creekside at Sunset Lake.   Woodward operated a mill near this location as early as 1781. A frequent gathering place, the business milled lumber, ground corn and wheat, and ginned cotton. Tax records from 1819 indicate the Woodward family ran a retail store on the site, the first in this area. Photo - Frances Collum Morgan Frances Collum Morgan is a direct descendant of Christopher Woodward and a diligent researcher of all things Holly Springs. She spent many years gathering documentation of Woodward's mill, store and the nearby must...

Artificial Intelligence made the biggest splash this year at RootsTech 2024. Check out the offerings and you will find AI applied to so many tasks in all areas of the genealogy world. The announcement that created the biggest shock waves came from FamilySearch. They have taken AI transcription technology and applied it - experimentally, so far - to their UNindexed   record sets. Their AI has the capability to transcribe handwriting, even old handwriting . I did a couple quick searches yesterday and it turned up results numbering in the hundreds to look through. This is an exciting new way to reseach my most stubbon elusive ancestors. Just FYI, you will find some shall we say "ODD" words included in  your transcriptions. The machine can only string together what it thinks it sees and sometimes that will surprise you. Poor sweet machine doesn't know that four letter words are four letter words... If that is what it sees, well, then you will see it too. Best to laugh and lea...