Sumter County, South Carolina

• 1. Please enter a query here ONLY if you have roots in Sumter County. Mention Sumter County in your query so that I am sure that it belongs on the Sumter page.
• 2. Include your full name in your query request.
• 3. Please put New Sumter County Query in the subject area of your message. I coordinate other counties and as assistant state coordinator for SCGenWeb, I often take on the duty of posting queries to an orphan county. I must know which county you want your query posted to.
• 4. Please write your query in this order: query surname(s) in upper case letters, query text , date of posting, your full name, and your e-mail address. (Send your mailing address, fax/phone number if desired.) This format will save me time and simplify the process of copy and paste so that I will make fewer errors in posting. Your e-mail address and full name are required before a query can be posted.
• 5. Please limit the content of your query to just the basic data that someone needs in order to assist you. This not only helps conserve server space, but will generate more responses for you. People tend to pay more attention to shorter, direct requests. I may have to edit queries that seem overly long.
• 6. Once you see that your query is up, please check your query for accuracy and make sure that your e-mail link works.
• 7. If your e-mail address changes, please notify me of your new address as soon as possible. Be sure to let me know exactly which page in which county your entry is on. I take care of a number of pages with hundreds of queries and surnames, so searching for your entry would be very time consuming. I cannot change the query or e-mail address if I don't know the exact name or url of the page.

I coordinate the web pages for other counties, so I must know which county you want your query posted to, plus I am on a number of mailing lists so I tend to delete some of the of e-mails that clutter my mail box with out reading all of them unless the subject catches my attention, assuming that it is spam.

 If "Sumter Query" is not placed in the subject area, it might be deleted without being read because there are days when I get 100 or more messages. I just can't read all of them. Please grab my attention with your subject line. I don't want to delete your message by mistake.

I will let you know when I post your query.
If you don't hear from me in a timley manner, please contact me again.

Please remember that I am a volunteer for the SCGenWeb project, and that I only post information to the web pages that I coordinate for others to view via the internet; I am not available for doing any personal research.

I will do my best to post new queries at least once per week. I teach school, I have a family, and 4 dogs and 6 cats so I might get behind. I always (almost always) get caught up over the weekend. If you see any errors, ommisions, typos, etc. please let me know. Your assistance will be greatly appreciated.

I am also coordinating the Clarendon County and the Lee County, South Carolina pages so be sure to let me know which county or counties you want to have your query posted on via the subject line. If you don't mention the county name, I will have to email you back and wait for your reply, which will make the process take longer.

I am quite willing to share information on the surnames that I research, but please understand that I am an amatuer genealogist with limited time for researching my own family lines. I do not research other surnames nor do I have info on other surnames other than from my family tree. I am happy to share my knowledge of Sumter County, but I am not available for outside research. See the surname pages to find out which surnames I am researching.

Please, do not write to me asking me to do a "quick" lookup in something like a Sumter County census or run to the courthouse for you and mail you a copy of a will. I am sure that you understand.

Thousands of people access the Sumter, Clarendon, and Lee County pages and there are over 700 folks on the SCSumter mailing list. Maybe one of them knows about your family line. I won't know anything about your family history unless we happen to share ancestors. I spend all of my spare time as a volunteer taking care of the Sumter, Clarendon, and Lee County SCGenWeb sites, the Sumter County Genealogical Society site, and a few others. What little spare time I have left, I devote to researching my own family tree. I do not do outside research.

Sumter has one of the best local archives in the state of South Carolina and our courthouse has won awards for their preservation of old records. The Sumter County Library has an entire reference area devoted to genealogy. Come here, to Sumter County to do your research and you'll receive a warm welcome. If you need information about where to research here in Sumter, just e-mail me. 

Sumter County Queries # 7 September 1998 - December 1998

Sumter County Queries #8 January 1999 - April 1999

Sumter County Queries #9 May 1999 - August 1999

Sumter County Queries # 10 September 1999 - December 31, 1999

Sumter County Queries # 11 January 1, 2000 - May 30, 2000

Sumter County Queries # 12 June 1, 2000 - December 31, 2000

Sumter County Queries # 13 January 1, 2001 - December 31, 2001

Sumter County Queries # 14 January 1, 2002 - June 8 - 2003

Sumter County Queries # 15 June 9, 2003 - January 2005

Sumter County Queries # 16 February 1, 2005 - present

Changes In E-mail Addresses or E-mails that Bounce From Query Pages

If a query writer's email address does not work, I will not know what their new e-mail address is.

Please, if your e-mail address changes, let me know.

You'll need to let me know:

• Exactly which page the query is on
• Surname in your query
• Your old email address
• Your new email address
• Your name

Since the list is dedicated to only three counties in South Carolina, there is not an enormous amount of traffic to deluge your mailbox. But, do check your mail on a regular basis. If your mailbox becomes full, your ISP will bounce any incoming mail that came from the Old Sumter District list back to Rootsweb, who in turn bounces it to me. Generally, your ISP has stripped the message of everything except for the address and subject line and it wouldn't do any good for me to forward it on to you it would just bounce again until the mailbox was no longer full. (Believe me, at first I did try to make sure that everyone got their mail. It became too much of a burden, so now I have made it my policy to just delete bounced mail with the message, "mailbox ful." I was spending too much time with bounced mail.) When bouncing email becomes a problem, the Rootsweb server will automatically remove that person's address from the mailing list after 3 bounced messages and the person will have to resubscribe.

Remember: You cannot send messages across the SCSumter list if you are not a subscriber. This policy is in force in order to keep SPAM off of the list. Rootsweb has a SPAM bouncer program. Any potenial SPAM is bounced to me. I read it and if it has been bounced in error, I forward it back on to the list. So far there have been no errors and hundreds of SPAM messages have been bounced from the SCSumter list by Rootsweb so that they did not end up in the subscribers' mailboxes. Occasionally, a message of genealogical interest will be sent by a non-subscriber who forgets that only members can post a message. If the message is one that needs to be forwarded on to the list, I will send it on. When you see a forwarded message, please reply to the email address embedded within the message and not to me.
 
 

Recommended by SCGenWeb, the South Carolina Genealogy mailing list is an on line discussion group devoted to the sharing of South Carolina genealogy. The list owner is Laura L Schmidt , coordinator of the Franklin County, Washington USGenWeb homepage. To subscribe to this mailing list, click on the blue hypertext below and send your one word message of subscribe.