Secrets of the North Carolina Room

For Deana Costner, researching her and her husband’s genealogy is like working the ultimate crossword puzzle. Some blanks are easy to fill in; other more-frustrating ones may forever remain empty.
The Costners live in Orlando, Fla.. With one clue in hand, they recently traveled the 600 miles to Morganton to dig through records in the North Carolina Room of the Burke County Public Library.
“There is only so much information you can find online,” said Costner, who uses Internet sites such as Ancestry.com to trace her family roots. “You still find more leads when you can go into the local community.”
In their quest to piece together their past, the Costners had a document with a woman’s name on it. They knew the woman had married a Revolutionary War soldier in South Carolina and hired an attorney in Burke County to settle a land record. They came to Morganton to find out more.
As the curator for the North Carolina Room, Gale Benfield meets folks like the Costners every day. She recently helped them plus a visiting professor from the University of South Dakota seeking information on the Brown Mountain Lights; a man from Sacramento, Calif., interested in the Crump family; and a woman from Hot Springs, Ark., assembling information on the Walker family.
“Genealogy is a big-time hobby now,” Benfield said. “A lot of retired couples base their travels around where their ancestors lived, and out-of-staters come looking for information on their ancestors as they pass through.”
The World Wide Web has made it easier for anyone to find information about his or her ancestors.
“At one time genealogy was only popular among the blue bloods,” Benfield said. “Now everybody is interested in who their family was.”
She also observed that people used to stop seeking information on their family once they found a “black sheep,” but now, Benfield continued, it’s kind of cool to have an infamous person in your lineage.
Benfield, whose maiden name is Haynes, has a mystery in her own family. Her great-great-grandfather was killed in Spruce Pine around the time the Civil War ended. She has learned through documents that the murder weapon was “a rock of no value” and it was a black man who threw it, killing her ancestor. The man’s only punishment was getting his hand branded, leaving Benfield to wonder what her great-great-grandfather did to the man who killed him.
“Everybody has a mystery to solve and in solving one you come up with others,” Ben-field said.
The Costners were not able to solve their mystery in Burke County, but so went on to Ashe County and then to Staunton, Va.
“We stay in local bed and breakfasts and eat at the local restaurants and buy gas,” Deana Costner said about their genealogy treks. “We are good for local economies.”
She said it helps when they run into people like Benfield who can point them in the right directions as they sift through documents.
“We tend to stay in a community longer when we come across someone who helps us when we are at a loss for what we are seeking,” said Costner, adding, “Our opinion on the community changes,”
One starting point to which Benfield points people is a file cabinet with 6,400 land grants dating back to 1778.
“You can find out where your family members lived, who their neighbors were and who married who,” Benfield said.
The land records show where property lines started and stopped by referring to rivers and roads, old wagon roads and Indian trails and even types of trees.
A computer in the North Carolina Room connects the land-grant records to maps. This deed-mapping database came courtesy of University of Tennessee chemistry professor Robert McNeely, who plugged in all of the land records to give folks a better visual idea of where their ancestors lived and who were their neighbors.
The first of the land grants date to one year after Burke County emerged in 1777 from part of Rowan County.
Burke at one time encompassed parts of what are now Buncombe, Caldwell, Mitchell and Yancey counties. Benfield uses a chart of N.C. counties’ development to help pinpoint where certain historic records may be. For example, if you know your ancestors were from Mitchell County, but you are looking for information on them from before 1860, you may have to pore through records in not only Burke, but also Yancey, Watauga, Caldwell and McDowell counties as Mitchell was born out of a part of each of these.
In addition to land grants, the North Carolina Room has an index of marriage and death certificates (the actual documents are at the Burke County Register of Deeds Office), files on more than 500 Burke County families collected from research that individuals donated to the room and newspapers on microfilm dating back to the mid-1800s.
Why people who visit the North Carolina Room, tucked in the back corner on the main floor of the library in Morganton, isn’t always clear when they first walk through the door, Benfield said, but the reason eventually comes out.
“From churches to organizations to criminals,” she said, “people come in looking for it all,”
Chances are, the room holds at least part of the answer.
As the university professor seeking information on the Brown Mountain Lights put it, the North Carolina Room  contains the most information in the smallest place.

Fast facts about the North Carolina Room
• Eunice Ervin, the sister of Sen. Samuel J. “Sam” Ervin Jr., was the first curator of the room in 1969-76. It’s easy to guess what file is largest: Senator Sam.
• To current curator Gale Benfield’s dismay, the most-requested file is the one on Frances “Frankie” Stewart Silver. “People, especially those who are new to the area, hear about her and they want to know who she was,” Benfield said about the woman involved in Burke’s infamous 1830s case of domestic violence and hanging.
• Another popular file contains information on Burke County’s gold rush in the 1830s in the Dysartsville area. Folks wonder if there’s still gold in these here hills.
• Maps of cemeteries are popular, especially those seeking markers for slaves or Confederate soldiers.
• The room has a plethora of information on state institutions including Broughton Hospital, the North Carolina School for the Deaf and the J. Iverson Riddle Development Center and about textile and furniture manufacturers.
• The Burke County Historical Society and the Burke County Genealogical Society and a handful of volunteers helped start the room’s collection and help keep it growing.

Tips from the curator
• People seeking information on their ancestors should be prepared to accept that the surname you know may have derived from several different spellings.
• Expect to get distracted. Gale Benfield said she often gets sidetracked while doing research. Old obituaries are her downfall.
• The books aren’t all about people. Some include plants, bugs and animals native to the area. Yes, you can bring in a bug in a jar and ask, “What is this?” Benfield will help you find the answer.

Benfield’s wish list
• That every church in the county would donate its history. Nettie McIntosh spearheaded a campaign a few years ago to get the 25 black churches in Burke County to provide information on their past.
• That individuals would donate annuals, yearbooks and other records of school history, including sports information.
• That those in the Hmong and Hispanic communities would start family files and donate pieces of their recorded history.
• That the room was bigger. It looks to be about 1,000 square feet. Benfield said she needs at least twice as much.

Recent finds and surprises
• A test for eighth graders from the 1920s that Benfield doubts school kids today could pass.
• A 1790s store journal that lists customers’ names and the purchases they made. On the list is botanist Andre Michaux. It’s not known where the store was located.

A morning in the life of the North Carolina Room
• Ed Phifer III with E.J. Victor stops by looking for a book on old houses and buildings in Burke County. His company is building a table made of wood taken from an old barn on the Swan Pons estate.
• A man stops in looking for information on Edward C. “Alabama” Pitts, a star athlete in prison who went on to play minor league baseball and then settle in Valdese in the 1930s. He was killed in a bloody Burke barroom brawl.
• A woman calls looking for history on the Pilot Mountain School on U.S. 64.

By the numbers
The North Carolina Room contains:
• 5,701 books on history and genealogy
• 3,174 photos in the Picture Burke database
• 1,080 reels of newspaper editions on microfilm
• 900 subject headings in a vertical file of clippings from The News Herald