Research Trip to North Carolina and Tennessee
By Linda Blais At our June meeting, Mary Kathryn Kozy gave us some practical tips for preparing to take a genealogy research trip. Listening to Mary brought back memories of the last research trip I took to North Carolina and Tennessee with my cousin who acted as my research assistant. It also brought up some "aha" or "oops" moments on a couple of things that didn't go quite as planned, even though I had spent months preparing my itinerary. Here are some basics about the trip. My goal was to visit as many historical sites, libraries, museums, courthouses and archives as I could in 10 days that were relevant to the life of Sarah Barton Murphy, who lived in North Carolina as a child between 1753 and 1760 and in Tennessee as an adult between 1781 and 1802. She is not my ancestor, but I am in the process of writing a biography about her. Her claim to fame is that she founded the first Sunday school west of the Mississippi in 1805. The research I do for an anc