The State Archives will be closed December 31-January 2 for the New Years holiday and January 9-11 for annual inventory. Regular hours will resume January 12 and can be found here.

Evangelist Billy Graham, who marked his 93rd birthday today, can now be heard back through the six decades of his public ministry. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association has made available nearly 1,700 audio files of sermons at Graham's famous crusades,  radio broadcasts, and public remarks. The archives are searchable by location, date and topic.

Last year, a joint project of UNC's North Carolina Collection, the State Archives and the Outer Banks History Center completed a project to scan and digitize more than 3,000 maps published from the late 1500s to 2000.

North Carolina Maps contains maps from each of the 100 counties, including highways, railroad maps, post office routes, fire insurance maps and geological maps. A 1936 highway map presents a view of the state without any I-40, in fact, without any interstate highways at all. The  Coast and Geodetic Survey shows changes in the state's coastline over time.

Maps are searchable by location, date or subject. The online viewer allows you to zoom in on the map and move around interactively.

In September, this map collection was one of three North Carolina sites to win an Award of Merit for Leadership in History from the American Association for State and Local History.
 

The Virginia Historical Society has loaded a searchable database of more than 1,500 slave names, with links back to original documents such as wills, bills of sale, court records, deeds, and deeds of emancipation. The database is searchable by the first and last name of the slave, the owner's name, the slave's occupation and location.

The project, called Unknown No Longer, is a work in progress, and historians continue to add information pulled from the nearly eight million items in the society's unpublished manuscript collection.

Now through September 5, you can search Ancestry.com's immigration and travel records for free.

This collection includes passport applications and border crossings, so you may be able to get information not only for immigrants but for an ancestor who traveled for fun or worked overseas.

Passenger lists go back to 1820. The information in these records varies over time, but you may find details such as marital status, last residence, final destination, literacy, financial status, place of birth, physical description, or the name and address of the passenger's closest living relative in his home country.

There's also a downloadable research guide to working with passenger lists.
 

Beginning Sept. 12, the Genealogical Research Services section of the State Library’s Government and Heritage Library will be closed on Mondays, due to budget restrictions.

New service hours for Genealogical Research Services will be Tuesday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Earlier this month, the Saturday hours were reduced.

If your research takes you to the Civil War, the NC State Archives has many resources covering that period. Individual states maintained records of creating and equipping their armies during the startup of the war. Beginning in 1862, the Confederate States of America took over, and records from that time forward reside in the National Archives. However, the State Archives has purchased copies of many of these resources, and many others have been digitized and are available online.

You can find a full explanation of Civil War resources on the North Carolina Civil War 150 blog.

One of the best places to find information about individual soldiers is the many rosters that have been compiled.

North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865, A Roster, which was begun at the Civil War's centennial in 1966, attempts to list every NC soldier, both Confederate and Union, with information from service records, muster rolls, Adjutant General’s records, pension applications, private collections, period newspapers, and another published roster, Roster of North Carolina Troops in the War Between the States (Moore’s Roster). It is currently up to 18 volumes, and more are planned, including an index. It is published by the Historical Publications Section of the NC Office of Archives and History and is available at many local libraries.

More information on individual soldiers can be found by searching his company or regiment records. The two most complete rosters of NC troops that will provide a company and regiment designations for individual soldiers are North Carolina Troops and The Roster of Confederate Soldiers 1861-1865.

Service records show enlistment and the whereabouts of the soldier at various points of his military career.

The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, which includes official correspondence and reports made during the war, is available and searchable online.  

The activities of troops following their service also creates a paper trail for researchers. These include pension records, the state auditor’s records of the old soldier’s home, and records of the issuance of artificial limbs.  The Governor's Office papers from each of the governors during the Civil War contains correspondence, such as petitions for help from the state, that provide information about the period and people.

Ashley Yandle, an information management archivist at the State Archives, will be giving a lecture August 8 at 10:30 about finding Civil War records online. She will introduce the Digital Civil War Collection available through the North Carolina Digital Collections in the NCDC and discuss how to search the online catalog. This program will be held at the State Library & Archives Building and  is free to the public.  Call (919)807-7310 to register and reserve your seat.

Confederate veterans. Photo courtesy of the NC State Archives.
 

UNC Library's Southern Folklife Collection houses an amazing collection of American folk music, with more than 160,000 sound recordings on cylinders, acetate discs, wire, 78 rpm and 45 rpm discs, LPs, cassettes, CDs, and open reel tapes. Musical styles include old-time, country-western, hillbilly, bluegrass, blues, gospel, Cajun and zydeco. Other materials include photographs, posters, and manuscripts related to the music. More background on the collection is available here.

All the materials are non-circulating, which means you have to be on site at Wilson Library to use them. Until now.  The library has created six streaming radio "stations" to bring many of these recordings right to your computer.  Take a listen to any of the following channels:

Channel 1: North Carolina

Channel 2: Memphis

Channel 3: Jimmie Rodgers, The Father of Country Music

Channel 4: New Orleans

Channel 5: SFC Mix

Channel 6: African-American Music

They're all good, but the SFC Mix offers a great sampling of the music of the South.

Mountain Music Festival, Asheville, September 1938. Photo courtesy NC State Archives.