Writing in his “Hub City Historian” blog, Brad Steinecke describes his discovery of a dusty, unlabeled ledger that contained the minutes for the Spartanburg County Commissioners of the Poor from 1796 to 1827.
Steinecke writes:
Steinecke writes:
There are several reasons this ledger could be particularly useful for family historians with a connection to Spartanburg County. The first has to do with its age. As you can imagine, there really aren't too many records from the late 18th and early 19th century in this part of the state. Courthouse records, military pension records, church records, the occasional family bible, and woefully inadequate census records form nearly the extent of the primary resources available. Combine the scarcity of resources overall with a documentary bias toward social elites (after all, wealthy landowners leave far more records than the forgotten, illiterate poor) and what you have is virtually no information for the small scale farmers and sharecroppers of that time period. From my own experience in tracing my family's history, some of those poorer families just disappear into the silence as you try to trace them further back. There just aren't records to show what their names were or that they were even alive.You can read more on Brad Steineck's “Hub City Historian” blog at http://hubcityhistorian.blogspot.com/
This ledger, on the other hand, is focused on the destitute and the wealthier individuals and families that oversaw their well-being.
