Jim White's Homepage

About Me

My name is Jim White and I grew up in Durham, North Carolina, but now live in Cary, North Carolina. I received my BA at UNC and majored in physics and psychology. I also have a MS from NCSU from the materials engineering department.During the 1990s I worked in telecommunications for Nortel Networks at Research Triangle Park. I am presently employed as a computer programmer working for the Biodiversity and Spatial Information Center. I have travelled overseas twice. Famous places I have visited are the pyramids, the Louvre, and the Tower of London. Things that I enjoy doing are working on the computer, genealogy, jogging, and following the Hurricanes.

I continue to enjoy learning about physics. The latest atom smashers at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and under construction at CERN are creating a quark gluon plasma. CERN was also where Tim Berners-Lee created the first web page. He invented the HTTP protocol and HTML, and started the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). An interesting web site concerning the history of physics is the Cavendish Laboratory site.

Genealogy

I have been researching my genealogy off and on since 1990. Mostly I have worked on my paternal line, and have been able to trace back to my immigrant ancestor, Thomas White, who arrived in Virginia before 1640.I feel that the available records support my conclusion, although connections of the earliest generations are perhaps less certain than the later ones. In connection with this research I have published two articles - one in The Virginia Genealogist and the other in The Bulletin of the Maryland Genealogical Society.

I have also written several shorter unpublished articles and lists of transcriptions I made about my White and related families genealogy. In addition there is a map of land grants in Lower Norfolk County in the 1600s I made with the DeedMapper program.

My great-grandfather, James McDaniel White , was in the Civil War and was wounded in the the Battle of Five Forks. Another ancestor, John L. Ward, was a soldier in the Revolutionary War. His pension application gives an interesting historical account of his service in the war. The earliest records for the White family come from an old book that was found by my great-uncle. He wrote in the front cover of the book about the book. "This book was found by John E. White in 1925 in a closet in the old White homestead on Rocky River. It was originally the property of my great-grandfather who was born in 1770. It establishes two generations of the White family in Chatham Co., N.C. with accurate birth dates."

I have long known that I was descended from the Washingtons of Surry Co., Virg., and I saw in the recently published book "The Royal Descents of 600 Immigrants" by Gary Boyd Roberts that there was a royal descent for this family. My research on this line found that it is mostly supported by primary evidence, with two generations that are probable. See discussion. Hence, I am the 24th generation descendant of Edward I.

Computer

I enjoy using the computer like everbody now. I have taken a number of computer courses from Wake Tech, where I learned to use Linux, and program C/C++. I am running Microsoft XP, and Debian Linux on my computers. Linux is a UNIX operating system clone that is composed of the Linux kernel, together with the GNU set of operating system utilities. I program with PHP using the PostgreSQL database. My homepage is hosted on a Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.20GHz with 500 MB of RAM running an Apache web server, and with a Netscreen firewall. My website domain, jimserver.net, is supposed to be read as "Jim's web server." I registered my domain with Go Daddy.com, and my DNS servers are hosted by zoneedit.

I have used the open source mapping program Mapserver to create a map of North and South Carolina. It is scanned from the Mouzon 1775 map I bought from NC Archives. I scanned it into my computer using my HP Scanjet 4370 in 8 parts, and used GRASS to reassemble it into one map. The Mapserver program allows you to pan around and zoom in to read relevant information from the map.

Useful links

Genealogy

Computer and GIS

Cool and miscellaneous links

contact: jbw2003@earthlink.net