African Roots Podcast Episode #205 March 8, 2013

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Hello and welcome back to the African Roots Podcast!
You can always reach me at AfricanRootsPodcast@gmail.com

I hope that everyone has recovered from the recent storm that has moved through, coming from the midwest and that moved to the northeast. I hope that you are all safe and warm. But spring is coming soon, and in three weeks spring will be here officially here. And a sign of the change in season, the days are getting longer and don’t forget to change you clocks this weekend.

Well, I had a lot of fun last night on the Bernice Bennett’s show and I was thrilled to be able to share some of my thoughts that have emanated from the many conversations that I have had with Bernice over the weeks, months, and years. I hope you get to tune in. We speak frequently and decided to take one of our conversations to the airwaves, so to speak. It was great to share things with her including the many items on my schedule for this coming year.

It is a good time to stop and reflect on how we share information, is how to share data and why. We collect lots of papers and documents, it is imperative that we do more than collect and share what we have. We can share the easy way by posting documents in various groups in Facebook, or Google+, or AfriGeneas—but remembering to generate some dialog about what you have. I also love blogging as a method of sharing–documents can be posted, discussed analyzed on blogs and this can catch the attention of others–sometimes strangers with whom we can have a good interaction.

This is a great time to find so much in so little time–but what do we do with it? I urge you all to blog—use Blogger, or Worpress or Typepad–which are free blogging platforms. And sharing data on Twitter and other sites is useful–but we don’t have a primer to follow. So we have lots to keep up with as well—but we need to join the community.

We are operating in a new environment online with no real rules out there, and we have to make sure that we are not distracted too much either by the many things that distract us online–and we have to stay focused as we share and read.

Some shout outs:
The African American Genealogy Group of Kentucky will have their regular 3rd Saturday meeting with a special guest discussing the migration of African Americans from Kentucky to Kansas.

The Delmarva Group of the Eastern Shore of MD representing Delaware, Maryland and Virginia–they are still organizing and working to become a community of genealogists.

A group of ladies who share a rich cultural history from Edgefield South Carolina. They are breaking new ground and sharing their data and having a wonderful journey as well.

This is a great time to be a genealogist because we are in a dynamic time and dynamic community of blogging, and new social interaction. This is time to think about preservation both the physical preservation of documents–but the need to share the stories that many family members need to know. We have to take our stories and put them out there—they don’t need to reside only in our heads. We have to put them in minds of others.

I am looking forward to events—The Genealogy Fair at the National Archives in Washington DC, MAAGI-the African American Genealogy Institute in St. Louis and the AAHGS conference and the Federation of Genealogical Societies and the California Genealogy Jamboree.

I hope to see you all out there this year, either in person, or online. In the meantime, thanks for following, and for sharing your notes and letters with me. And continue to keep researching, keep documenting and keep sharing what you find.

Posted by Angela Y. Walton-Raji

Author, lecturer and researcher. Author, "Black Indian Genealogy Research, An Expanded Edition". Editor, Voices of Indian Territory. Member AAHGS -Afro-American Historical & Genealogical Society. PAAC-Preservation of African American Cemeteries. Founding Member of AfriGeneas. Faculty member for Samford IGHR, MAAGI-Midwest African American Genealogy Institute.

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