TIP OF THE WEEK –
A GREAT RESOURCE FOR WESTERN
NORTH CAROLINA RESEARCH: the BGSOTC

A terrific genealogical society, the Genealogical Society of Old Tryon County, has published abstracts of many of the surviving documents in western North Carolina. Tryon County was created in 1769 and in 1779 its name was changed to Lincoln County. While Old Tryon County no longer exists, it included the geographic area that is now Rutherford, Cleveland, Lincoln, and Gaston counties of North Carolina, and Cherokee and York Counties of South Carolina, plus portions of several NC and SC counties that border these counties – A LARGE AREA.

This wonderful society’s publication, Bulletin of the Genealogical Society of Old Tryon County (BGSOTC for short) began in 1973, and its issues contain abstracts of all types of records – wills, deeds, court records, family histories, etc. – from all of the counties listed above.

It gets better! They’ve created an every-name index for the issues of the BGSOTC from 1992 to the present, and placed it online at http://www.oldtryon.com/

If you have ancestors in this part of western NC or upper SC, check out this index. You can search for your ancestors from the comfort of home!

SGS has BGSOTC issues from 1998 to the present, so if you find one of your ancestors in the online index, the issue may well be in our collection.