African Roots Podcast Episode #168 June 22, 2012

Play

Welcome back to the African Roots Podcast!
You can reach me at AfricanRootsPodcast@gmail.com

It is great to be back home after a wonderful week at Samford University Genealogy Institute! The experience was wonderful and I met so many fascinating people throughout the week. But coming home is always great! By the way, I was blogging from Samford, so if you want to see what was going on, take a look at the updates on my personal blog.

By the way, I urge you to tune in to Bernice Bennett’s Blog Radio program! Last night’s episode was devoted to blogging. I was honored to be a guest on the show and was thrilled to share my feelings about blogs. But her other two guests was truly a joy for me to hear—Andrea Kelleher a new blogger and Melvin Collier a writer and teacher. They were so much fun to listen to. Tune in to hear the archived version of her show if you missed it!
Kind of a slower time period as far as conferences are concerned, but genealogy meetings are going on as usual.

Central MD AAHGS is having their monthly meeting with a special presentation by Bill Shelton on the critical need to back up our data. This meeting is always great, as there are also door prizes and genealogical challenges for those in attendance as well. They meet at the Owen Brown Community Center in Columbia MD at 1 pm.

Best wishes to those in Giles County Tennessee who are celebrating the history of the African American community will be celebrating its history, the history of the 110th and 111th US Colored Infantries. The events will take place in Pulaski this weekend.

July 13-14th Columbia South Carolina
The 40th Annual Summer Conference of the South Carolina Genealogical Society will take place. Keynote speakers are Tony Burroughs and Jan Alpert. A detailed scheduled is online here. Wevonneda Minus will also be presenting. I met her last week at Samford.

Free genealogy classes at the Historical Society of Baltimore County are offered each month on the first Thursday of the month from 10:00 – 2:00 pm. They are free and open to the public.

Registration is now available for upcoming conference–the FGS Conference in Birmingham now has open registration. There are other events as well to follow that—October the Chicago society has a conference, the national AAHGS conference is holding its conference in Greensboro NC, and the International Black Genealogy Summit will take place in Salt Lake City. Register early for these events.

This is summer and great time to create some new memories. Take pictures and collect signatures of family and friends—you are creating new artifacts and memories! Are you creating new treasures? Remember the old autograph books that one used to get at the old five and dime stores? They were small books with blank pages. All one had to do was to get signatures of friends and family to sign the book. Well, what a treasure. If you find an old book, you will see the nams of the friends of the original owner, and you can sew together a community just by looking at these books and learn who their friends were. This is perhaps something to do once again—create that new artifact! Summer is the best time to create new memories. Maybe it’s time to create that newsletter, or the blog we have wanted to create.

We are old story tellers and we have many methods of getting those stories out there. Create the books, newsletters, scrapbooks, or yes, blogs!
How Did I Get Here?by Andrea Kelleher
Reconnected Roots, by Melvin Collier

We must remember that we are all story tellers!

Thanks for listening and please 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.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *