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by Alton T. Moran (Author)
When the South Carolina General Assembly offered a ₤1,000 bounty to obtain a printer in 1731, several men responded and two papers resulted-the South Carolina Gazette, printed by Thomas Whitmarsh, and the South Carolina Weekly, printed by Eleazer Phillips. (No issues of the latter survive.) Thomas Whitmarsh was an Englishman who had worked with Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia. After coming to Charleston in the summer of 1731, Whitmarsh set up a shop for printing pamphlets, broadsides, legal forms, and the Gazette. He died in September of 1733 and the Gazette languished until February of 1734 when Lewis Timothee, another associate of Franklin, took it up and continued to publish it until his death in 1738. This collection of genealogical data includes all mentions of local residents beginning with the first issue of the Gazette on 8 January 1732 through 27 December 1735. The data runs the gamut from the usual marriage and death notices to all kinds of interesting tidbits such as notices of runaway slaves, advertisements, auctions, and stolen or strayed animals, and provides an intimate view of life in South Carolina in the early 1700s.
