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As March is Women's History Month, I decided to do the exploring for you on what resources WCGS has provided relevant to women's research. I started my search on our Blog page and found the recent post on Women Who Shaped Wake County.  Once there, be sure to follow the imbedded links to learn more about the five women highlighted in this post: Margaret Wake Tryon, Anna Julia Cooper, Dorothea Dix, Elizabeth Murray Reid, and Josephine Ella Baker. A post from 2022 highlighted the 1899 building of the Baptist Female University, which has since become Meredith College. This lead me to search for yearbook and catalogue records for this Wake institution, and I found that Meredith has digitized 205 items from their collection covering the three incarnations of the college.  You can find the link to these records on our Wake Research Links webpage under Meredith College. Personally, I find these old catalogues fascinating reading, and they are rich with the names of women.

 

Another 2022 post was for Diane L. Richard's presentation to the society "In Her Own Words - the Lives of Women".  If you are a WCGS member, you can log into the members area and download her meaty six-page handout on this topic.  Whether a member or not, you can also access Diane's site where she shares two free articles on "Finding Women in Ledgers" written for the magazine Your Genealogy Today.  Diane is a former WCGS President and a former editor of our journal who has moved on to bigger and better genealogical opportunities! As a member of the Genealogical Speaker's Guild, she is in demand and will be returning to us in June to present on "Digging for Gold in Colonial North Carolina Records".  Be sure to put this on your calender!

 

Other women-related topics can be found within the issues of our journal Wake Treasures, which is now open to all researchers.  Besides the usual BMD records (Birth, Marriage, Death), women can be found in the Bastardy Bonds records (Vols. 1-9, 21,and 25) and Divorce records (Vols 5-21.)  Check the Subject Index Guide to help narrow your search by date of the event. There are also over 25 Slave Narratives from women (Vols. 6-9). Other topics in the journal include newspaper clippings about Meredith College and the opening of women-owned boarding houses; customers of the William Hill Merchandising Store (Vol. 1 Issues 2-4), and biographical sketches of Carrie L. Broughton (Vol 2. Issue 2), Mary Bayard Clarke (Vol. 21 Issue 1), and Mary Ann Towles (Vol. 1 Issue 4).

 

I hope this is helpful and that you are able to find some of your female ancestors within our resources.  I know I will be looking to add more women-relevant resources to our links page. 

 

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It is well-known how technology has changed the way information is disseminated.  The growth of on-line platforms are providing new ways of sharing and reaching a broader audience.  WCGS has seen these changes and over the years has expanded its outreach through our WCGS Facebook and WCGS Blog social-media pages.  We also modernized our website several years ago and then converted our newsletter distribution to an on-line digital format where issues can be stored and made available at the click of a mouse!  In the past hard-copy publications provided the standard format for keeping information available, but these are only useful when they can be conveniently accessed.  Thus, the next step for WCGS involved making changes to our Wake Treasures Journal.  This summer the Society voted to change our method for disseminating information usually found in the journal to other formats including our social media sites, our newsletter, and our website.  In the spirit of increasing our support to the genealogical community, the Board also voted to make all past issues of Wake Treasures available to both members and non-members alike!

 

Wake Treasures is the multi-award winning journal of the Wake County Genealogical Society.  Over the years the number of issues per year has varied from two to four.  From the Wake Treasures page you can download in pdf format, any or all of the Wake Treasures issues which have been published starting with the first issue in 1991 which includes an 1809 tax list from the Buffelow district and Wake Bastardy Bond files starting in 1772!  The December 2022 publication is the final issue of the Journal and it includes the 1896 Raleigh Tax List and the WW1 deaths from Wake County.   To help your search, there is a Subject Index available for the first 25 volumes of the Journal.  We hope you are successful in finding your Wake ancestors in the record transcriptions and abstractions available in these genealogical-rich issues.