Tracing Your Alabama Past [Paperback]

Robert Scott Davis (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1578064929 | ISBN-13: 978-1578064922 | Publication Date: November 20, 2002

Searching for your Alabama ancestors? Looking for historical facts? Dates? Events? This book will lead you to the places where you'll find answers.

Here are hundreds of direct sources--governmental, archival, agency, online--that will help you access information vital to your investigation.

Tracing Your Alabama Past sets out to identify the means and the methods for finding information on people, places, subjects, and events in the long and colorful history of this state known as the crossroads of Dixie. It takes researchers directly to the sources that deliver answers and information.

This comprehensive reference book leads to the wide array of essential facts and data--public records, census figures, military statistics, geography, studies of African American and Native American communities, local and biographical history, internet sites, archives, and more.

For the first time Alabama researchers are offered a how-to book that is not just a bibliography. Such complex sources as Alabama's biographical/genealogical materials, federal land records, Civil War­era resources, and Native American sources are discussed in detail, along with many other topics of interest to researchers seeking information on this diverse Deep South state.

Much of the book focuses on national sources that are covered elsewhere only in passing, if at all. Other books only touch on one subject area, but here, for the first time, are directions to the Who, What, When, Where, and Why.

Robert Scott Davis, a professor of history at Wallace State College in Hanceville, Ala., is the author of more than twenty books, including Requiem for a Lost City: Sallie Clayton's Memories of Civil War Atlanta and Cotton, Fire, and Dreams: The Robert Findlay Iron Works.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

For genealogists and others, a detailed guide to informational resources in Alabama records

About the Author

Robert Scott Davis, a professor of history at Wallace State College in Hanceville, Ala., is the author of more than twenty books, including Requiem for a Lost City: Sallie Clayton's Memories of Civil War Atlanta and Cotton, Fire, and Dreams: The Robert Findlay Iron Works. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi (November 20, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578064929
• ISBN-13: 978-1578064922
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #290,963 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #20 in Books > Education & Reference > Genealogy > United States
  • #66 in Books > Education & Reference > Publishing & Books > Bibliographies & Indexes > History

More About the Author

Robert Scott Davis, Jr., has more than 1,000 publications dealing with genealogy, history, records, and research, most of which deal with the state of Georgia (USA) in some form or fashion. He has been widely quoted by or appeared in CNN, Time, Smithsonian, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. His work has received awards from the American Association for State and Local History; the Sons of the American Revolution; and the National Genealogical Society. He is a graduate of Piedmont College, North Georgia State College and University, and the University of Alabama in Birmingham.

Raised in Forest Park, Georgia, Bob is the son of the late Robert Scott Davis, Sr. (b. Gainesville, Ga.) and Elizabeth Kathleen Holbert (b. Jasper, Ga.) His work owes everything to his being encouraged and inspired by history teachers including Ted Key, later a Georgia teacher of the year. He first began his writing in 1974 when, as a cadet at then North Georgia College, he worked as Georgia's first history state intern and had been assigned the project of putting together an historical site survey on the little known Kettle Creek Revolutionary War battlefield. Despite the many hundreds of topics he has since explored, he always returns to that singular event and has used it in his most recent and important book, a collection of essays on Americans who supported the King during the American Revolution.

Bob also did a number of books on Georgia records that were published by the late Rev. Silas Emmett Lucas and he regularly contributed to the North Georgia Journal, a popular magazine on the region of Georgia where his family has lived for generations. Most of the latter articles have been reprinted in a series of books compiled by Olin Jackson called A North Georgia Journal of History. Aside from guides to doing research in Alabama and Georgia, he found and annotated the memoirs of Sallie Clayton, a young woman of Civil War Atlanta, and he did a book on the ppreviously lost personal histories of many characters in the tragic story of Andersonville Civil War prison. His most popular books, however, have been his compilations of records of Georgia murderers, liars, prison inmates, and other persons with problems in the state's early history.

Over the years, he has been helped by, and he occasionally helped, Georgia's greatest researchers including E. Merton Coulter, Kenneth H. Thomas Jr., David M. Sherman, Farris Cadle, Carl A. Anderson, and Gordon B. Smith. With the help of such scholars, he has acquired a number of significant historical collections for the Hargrett Library of the University of Georgia (where he deposits his own files) and other libraries. In 1993, he spent a month in Great Britain completing a project for the R. J. Taylor Jr. Foundation to povide the Georgia Archives with the most extensive collection of copies of colonial records fo any of the American British colonies.

Robert S. Davis, as he usually styles himself, lives in Blountsville, Alabama, and curently serves as director of the Family & Regional History Program at Wallace State College in nearby Hanceville. Bob also teaches history and genealogy classes and he frequently speaks to various groups across the country.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tracing your Alabama Past, February 14, 2004

By 

K. Graham (Alabama) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tracing Your Alabama Past (Paperback)

This book is great for the true researcher.
It gives the years in which each County conatins what records which will save a lot of phone calls & trips.
It refers to other wonderful books that one can get to trace something inparticular. It also refers to finding Alabama research in other States which I found most helpful.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars excellent resource, January 7, 2010

By 

Emily Twain "Em" - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Tracing Your Alabama Past (Paperback)

This is an excellent resource for anybody intending to do genealogical research for Alabama roots. Complete guide to finding resources.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tracing Your Alabama Past, January 16, 2009

By 

Bobby Steele (Baytown, Texas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tracing Your Alabama Past (Paperback)

Awesome book with tons of information.
This book lists numerous books, areas of research, where and how to search Alabama records.
This book will save you alot of leg work. Tells how and where to look for Alabama info. A must have if you are a serious Alabama reasearcher.