Documenting the American South

Documenting the American South contains primary sources (texts, images, and audio files) on southern history, literature, and culture. It is sponsored by the University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. DocSouth contains the following collections:

The Church in the Southern Black Community
The Colonial and State Records of North Carolina
Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina
Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina
The First Century of the First State University
First-Person Narratives of the American South
Going to the Show
The James Lawrence Dusenbery Journal (1841-1842)
Library of Southern Literature
North American Slave Narratives
The North Carolina Experience
North Carolina Maps
North Carolinians and the Great War
Oral Histories of the American South
The Southern Homefront, 1861-1865
Thomas E. Watson Papers
True and Candid Compositions: The Lives and Writings of Antebellum Students at the University of North Carolina

The collections can be browsed or searched individually. It is also possible to search across all collections.

I found references to my 6th- and 7th-great-grandfathers Abel Gower Jr. and Sr. in the Colonial and State Records of North Carolina collection. They were listed as Abel Gowen, but I could tell from the content that the documents referred to my ancestors (Sr. and Jr. were listed together with others who had traveled with my Abel Gowers). I also found references to an Abel Gower who was with the Regulators of North Carolina. This man may not be one of my ancestors; there was another Abel Gower who served in the Revolutionary War in North Carolina and later went to Georgia. I think that Abel Gower was related to my Abel Gowers, but I do not know what the relationship was.