Anderson County, South Carolina Genealogy


 * This article is about a northwestern South Carolina county. For other uses, see Anderson.

United States &gt; South Carolina &gt; Anderson County

Parent County
1826--Anderson County was created 20 December 1826 from Pendleton District. County seat: Anderson

Neighboring Counties

 * Abbeville
 * Elbert County, Georgia
 * Greenville
 * Hart County, Georgia
 * Laurens
 * Oconee
 * Pickens

Cemeteries
The book, Book of the Dead, by R.M. Smith is excellent for finding cemetery inscriptions in Anderson County as 22,000 names are listed in alphabetical order for the entire county. This book is 439 pages, covering 200 cemeteries including many private family cemeteries. Inscriptions include people born in the 1750s.

Census
The book, 1800 Census of Pendleton District, SC by William Stewart is an excellent book. It covers present day Anderson County, Pickens County and Oconee County. The author provides many annotations of people and families listed in this census, especially migration information before 1800 from Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina and after 1800 to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas.

Searching 1840 Anderson County census using Ancestry.com will always result zero responses even for the last name of Smith because Ancestry mistakenly indexed Anderson County residents in 1840 as Charleston County (as of 1 November 2007 had not been corrected) so look for your 1840 Anderson County people in Charleston County when using Ancestry.

Church
LDS Ward and Branch Records


 * Anderson

Land
Land Ownership Maps -- The Library of Congress created an 1877 land ownership map for Anderson County and the state created a 1897 land ownership map.

Plats For State Land Grants 1784-1868

This series consists of recorded copies of plats for state land grants for the Charleston and the Columbia Series with their certificates of admeasurement or certification. All personal names and geographic features on these plats are included in the repository's On-line Index to Plats for State Land Grants

The South Carolina Constitution of 1790 required the surveyor general to maintain offices in both the new capital at Columbia and in Charleston. The surveyor general began to use separate volumes for recording plats in his Columbia office in 1796. Before that, all plats were recorded in the set of volumes begun in Charleston in 1784. After 1796, most plats for land grants in the Upper Division of the state were recorded and filed in Columbia. The surveyor general chose to make the Columbia volumes a continuation of the state plat volumes begun in Charleston and gave the initial Columbia volume the number thirty-six to correspond with the number of the volume that had then been reached in the Charleston series. As a result, there are volumes numbered thirty-six through forty-three from each office, but the records in them are not duplicative.

Also included are the Plan Books containing Plats and Plans.

Probate
The South Carolina Department of Archives and History has microfilms or typescripts of wills, inventories, bills of sale, power of attorneys, bonds, notes, administrations, judgments, and sales records. They have placed Will Transcriptions for 1782 to 1855 online. Index searchable by name and the image is available. The Wills from Pendleton District were transcribed as Anderson County.

Websites

 * Old Pendleton District
 * USGenWeb project. May have maps, name indexes, history or other information for this county. Select the state, then the county.
 * Family History Library Catalog