Post Office Records: Politics, Religion, Hobbies, Connections, and More by Diane Richard
Most talks on post offices focus on them as federal employees -- for those seeking to document family members who worked for the post office. Post offices aren’t just about employees or even the mail! Post offices used to define communities, and people used their location to define where they lived. If you want to know where a small community was located, see if it had a post office. Most of us receive our newspapers and magazines directly from the publisher, either printed or electronic, or purchased in a store. These subscriptions used to be handled at the post office. Wouldn’t you like to see great-great-grandpa’s subscription list? These subscriptions provide insight about a person, often including religious and/or political leanings, hobbies, news interests, and much more. These newspaper subscription records are often organized by customers! We can gain a personal perspective on our ancestors while learning the reading habits of the larger community. Priceless!
Diane L Richard, MEng & MBA, Mosaic Research and Project Management (MosaicRPM), www.mosaicrpm.com, has been doing genealogy research since 1987 and, since 2004, professionally focused on the records of North Carolina and southern states. She regularly contributes to Internet Genealogy. She has authored over 500 articles on genealogy topics. In 2019 she published, Tracing Your Ancestors -- African American Research: A Practical Guide via Moorshead Publications. Since 2016 she has been the editor of the North Carolina Genealogical Society (NCGS) journal.
As a speaker, she has delivered webinars and in-person talks about the availability and richness of records documenting southerners, pursuing formerly enslaved ancestors and their descendants, genealogical research tips, techniques, tools and strategies, under-utilized resource collections [online and on-the-ground], and much more. She has appeared on Who Do You Think You Are? (Bryan Cranston episode).
She is a board member of NC Historical Records Online (NCHRO), http://nchistoricalrecords.org/, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing public access to high-quality images of original records and other related information useful to researching North Carolina history and genealogy.
Access will be through GoToWebinar. Instructions and Connectivity Link will be forwarded via email to all registrants upon registration, six days prior and again 1 hour prior to the event. Making the connection is quick and easy only requiring a computer and Internet connectivity from wherever you chose to watch the event. Your questions help drive the meetings, and we will be there to help each other.
