About the Project: How to Navigate “Other Souths”

 The Importance of Questions
The more questions that a user brings to “Other Souths,” the more useful that it will be to them.  The project is a “digital archive,” meaning that it aims to make sources available rather than to make an argument.  This means that those hoping passively to learn about the county’s history may be disappointed and will find only minimal exposure to traditional accounts on the “Historical Overview.”  Those who visit the archive with questions in mind, on the other hand, will find resources for answering them in an exciting, interactive fashion.  Such questions may be about big patterns of historical interpretation—wondering about the prevalence of slavery in an Upper South community, for example, or about the status of free people of color—or they may be about more specific genealogical issues.  It is also possible to generate questions while browsing the archive, following one’s curiosity to compare the relative economic status of musicians and physicians in 1860, for example….

The Challenges of Digitization
The digitization of primary sources conceals the messiness of those sources in the original.  A cursive initial with an ink smudge that could either be an “E” or a “C” becomes one or the other.  Estimated numbers become “facts,” transformed by time and technology from an enumerator’s ballpark estimate into a statistic.  An enumerator’s best guess in the tricky business of racial classification makes a family of all African ancestry “mulatto”—or makes a family of multiracial descendents of North Carolina Indians “black.”  Please keep this original messiness in mind when searching. 

Source: The United States Census Bureau has produced an excellent pamphlet explaining the changes in the federal census over the years, which includes sample images from the various forms. A version of this pamphlet is available online at adapted from the returns available online at .

One of the best ways to recognize the vagaries of the primary sources in their manuscript form (see a blank form from the 1860 Population Census above) is to cast one’s net broadly in a search.  In order to search the 1860 population census for octogenarian Elizabeth Douglass, for instance, start by searching for “E” Douglass.  Searching for “Elizabeth” would yield no results, since her name only appeared in the records as “Eliz.!”  Work from the general to the specific for best results.

Technical Note
“Other Souths” is best viewed through Firefox or Safari, though most of the functions will work with Internet Explorer.  Internet Explorer has difficulty remembering search results and returning to them from the detail screens, a problem that is particularly pronounced in the Confederate Service Records.