TheShipsList.com

TheShipsList website, online since August 1999, will help you find your ancestors on ships' passenger lists.We also have immigration reports, newspaper records, shipwreck information, ship pictures, ship descriptions, shipping-line fleet lists and more; as well as hundreds of passenger lists to Canada, USA, Australia and even some for South Africa.

We have over 3,000 totally free access web-pages with new databases added regularly.

To access: Click Here.

Early Images of Virginia Indians

In 1493 Columbus wrote a letter about his discoveries that was translated and published across Europe. That report opened a period in which the New World became a subject of great interest to Europeans. Especially fascinating were the native peoples. The name "Indians" derived from Columbus's belief that the islands he found were in the Indian Ocean and was used in England as early as 1553.

Europeans learned about the Virginia Indians through both words and pictures. Yet as important as the writings of explorers and colonists were, the most powerful impressions came from prints. The coastal areas around the Chesapeake Bay were visited by a number of European explorers in the 1500s. No images of the natives were produced, however, until the English became interested in colonization in the 1580s.

In January 1585 Queen Elizabeth consented to Sir Walter Ralegh's request that the land along the North American coast be named in her honor as "Virginia." The William W. Cole Collection contains many of the engravings of Virginia, produced from 1590 to the 1800s, that influenced European opinions of, and thus policies toward, the natives.

For more, including the images: Click Here.

C.B. Caudill Store and History Center

Established by Tessie Mae Hogg Caudill, daughter of Blackey merchants, and her husband, C.B. Caudill, in 1933, the store has been the community center, the unofficial bank, the place to use the telephone, and the social conscience of a community for more than 60 years. When C.B. died in 1966, the business passed to his daughter, Gaynell, and her husband, Joe Begley, who took up the torch of bettering their community and extended their influence beyond Blackey's borders.Their leadership led to stricter regulation of strip mining, formation of a local library, improved health care, and a new Blackey water system.

In 1997, the store closed its doors as a retail business and began a new life as a regional history museum and cultural center. This exciting endeavor includes partnerships with local schools, collection of oral history interviews and old photographs, a permanent exhibit on Blackey history (in progress), and arts programming including exhibits, music and lectures. The most interesting aspect of the project is still Joe and Gaynell, who live at one end of the store and enjoy chatting with visitors about their experiences.

To visit the store: Click Here.

The Kentucky Coal Museum

The Kentucky Coal Museum brings back to life one of the most unique and interesting aspects of early coal mining – the company store.

Housed in the old commissary built by International Harvester in the 1920s, the museum features four stories of exhibits on the history of mining and the life of the coal miner.

Visitors can enjoy a step back in time to the coal miner’s workplace, his home and his community.

Artifacts, antiques, photographs, and machinery make up the more than 30 exhibits.

For more, including a video tour: Click Here.

A coal company commissary was known as the company store. For pictures of a number of company stores and the coal mining communities that were built around them: Click Here.

English Glossary of Archaic Medical Terms

Diseases and Causes of Death

This is by far the most extensive such list I have ever seen online.

To consult it: Click Here.

The Letcher Heritage News

The Letcher Heritage News is a semiannual publication of the Letcher County [Kentucky] Historical and Genealogical Society (LCHGS). The following is an index of the articles contained in each issue to date. You can use the FIND function of your Web Browser to search for Key Words (ie. Cemetery, Pedigree, etc.). Back issues of the Letcher Heritage News can be ordered, if still available, for $2 per issue, plus $1.50 postage. Contact the LCHGS for availability and ordering information.

To see the index: Click Here.

Note: A hyperlink for contacting the LCHS is provided and a few articles can be read online.

Colonial Tithables

Published by the Library of Virginia

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginia, the term “tithable” referred to a person who paid (or for whom someone else paid) one of the taxes imposed by the General Assembly for the support of civil government in the colony. In colonial Virginia, a poll tax or capitation tax was assessed on free white males, African American slaves, and Native American servants (both male and female), all age sixteen or older. Owners and masters paid the taxes levied on their slaves and servants. Few tithable lists are extant. The Library of Virginia holds full or partial lists for about three dozen counties. A detailed guide to manuscript, microfilmed, and printed tithables is available in the Archives Research Room. See also the VA-NOTES entries on Colonial Taxes and on Tithables for a list of documents in the archival records in the Library of Virginia containing the names of people who paid the tax on tithables.

Tithable lists do not enumerate anyone under the age of sixteen or any adult white woman (unless she was the head of household). Laws published in Hening’s Statutes at Large may assist the researcher in understanding who was considered tithable and how tithable lists were taken. In an attempt to stop fraud concerning the “yearly importation of people into the collonie,” an act was passed in the House of Burgesses in 1649 requiring that all male servants imported into Virginia (“of what age soever”) be placed on the tithable lists. Natives of the colony and those imported free who were under the age of sixteen were exempt. (William W. Hening, ed. The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619…[1809–1823], 1:361–362.)

To continue reading: Click Here.